periods too strong to be wholly rejected; so that even the materialists, like Lucretius and the elder Pliny, find themselves obliged to acknowledge them; while, on the other hand, the extravagant admissions that are demanded of us by those who endeavor to explain them away, prove that their disbelief rests on no more solid foundation than their own prejudices. I acknowledge all the difficulty of establishing the facts—such difficulties as indeed encompass few other branches of inquiry; but I maintain that the position of the opponents is still worse, although, by their high tone and contemptuous laugh, they assume to have taken up one that, being fortified by reason, is quite impregnable, forgetting that the wisdom of man is pre-eminently “foolishness before God,” when it wanders into this region of unknown things;—forgetting, also, that they are just serving this branch of inquiry, as their predecessors, whom they laughed at, did physiology; concocting their systems out of their own brains, instead of the responses of nature—and with still more rashness and presumption, this department of her kingdom being more inaccessible, more incapable of demonstration, and more entirely beyond our control; for these spirits will not “come when we do call them;”—and I confess it often surprises me to hear the very shallow nonsense that very clever men talk upon the subject, and the inefficient arguments they use to disprove what they know nothing about. I am quite conscious that the facts I shall adduce are open to controversy: I can bring forward no evidence that will satisfy a scientific mind; but neither are my opponents a whit better fortified. All I do hope to establish is, not a proof, but a presumption; and the conviction I desire to awaken in people’s minds is, not that these things _are_ so, but that they _may be_ so, and that it is well worth our while to inquire whether they are or not. It will be seen that these views of a future state are extremely similar to those of Isaac Taylor, as suggested in his physical theory of another life—at least, as far as he has entered upon the subject;—and it is natural that they should be so, because he seems also to have been a convert to the opinion that “the dead do sometimes break through the boundaries that hem in the ethereal crowds; and if so, as if by trespass, may in single instances infringe upon the ground of common corporeal life.”