Now, I ask if this is a fair way of treating any fact, transmitted to us on authority which the objector himself admits to be perfectly satisfactory—more especially as the assistants on the occasion appear to have been quite as unwilling to believe in the _supernatural_ interpretation of it as Dr. Hibbert could have been himself, had he been present; for what more could he have done than conclude the young lady to be mad, and bled her?—a line of practice which is precisely what would be followed at the present time, and which proves that they were very well aware of the sensuous illusions produced by a disordered state of the nervous system; and with respect to his conclusion that the “languishing female” contributed to the verification of the prediction, we are entitled to ask, where is the proof that she was languishing? A very clever watchmaker once told me that a watch may go perfectly well for years, and at length stop suddenly, in consequence of an organic defect in its construction, which only becomes perceptible, even to the eye of a watchmaker, when this effect takes place; and we do know that many persons have suddenly fallen dead immediately after declaring themselves in the best possible health: and we have therefore no right to dispute what the narrator implies, namely, that there were no sensible indications of the impending catastrophe. There was either some organic defect or derangement in this lady’s physical economy, which rendered her death inevitable at the hour of noon, on that particular Thursday, or there was not. If there was, and her certain death was impending at that hour, how came she acquainted with the fact? Surely it is a monstrous assumption to say that it was “a fortunate coincidence,” when no reason whatever is given us for concluding that she felt otherwise than perfectly well! If, on the contrary, we are to take refuge in the supposition that there was no death impending, and that she only died of the fright, how came she—feeling perfectly well, and, in this case, we have a right to conclude _being_ perfectly well—to be the subject of such an extraordinary spectral illusion? And if such spectral illusions can occur to people in a good normal state of health, does it not become very desirable to give us some clearer theory of them than we have at present?