citizen Bancroft took great care, during his mortal career, to accumulate a respectable amount of cash with the object of forming a bribe for the guardians of his body. Accordingly, in his will he left the sum of twenty-eight thousand pounds for the establishment of schools and almshouses, with this proviso, that his body should be ‘preserved within a shew glass’ in the church.” During the time I was in Paris, and arranging the ghost for exhibition at the Théâtre du Châtelet under Mons. Hostein, I was surprised to find that the conjuror, Mons. Robin, was showing the ghost at his séances. My lawyers interviewed him, and discovered that, some years before, a little toy had been brought out and patented in France by which a miniature ghost could be shown. It consisted of a box with a small sheet of glass, placed at an angle of forty-five degrees, and it reflected a concealed table, with plastic figures, the spectre of which appeared behind the glass, and which young people who possessed the toy invited their companions to take out of the box, when it melted away, as it were, in their hands and disappeared. In France at that time all improvements on a patent fell to the original patentee, and under that law I lost the patent in France; but Mons. Hostein honourably paid me a large sum of money for the use of my improved ghost at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris. Query.—Had Mr. Dircks’ patent agent, in his searches after patents, ever come across the toy invented in Paris? Because it is substantially the ghost apparatus and produced that illusion; and thus it shows how correct are the words of Solomon, who has told us “There is nothing new under the sun.” If the reader will consult a book written by me, entitled “Cyclopædic Science Simplified,” formerly published by Messrs. Frederick Warne and Co., but now bought and published by Messrs. Lippincott, the great American publishers of Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.A., he will find a very near approach to the ghost apparatus copied from Robinson’s “Recreative Memories” published in 1831. The same author describes how the famous magician (so-called) Nostrodamus deceived even the astute and wily Marie de’ Medicis by a vision which appeared in a looking-glass. Moreover, Sir Walter Scott, in his beautiful poem, “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” has introduced the use of mirrors for producing ghostly appearances, in the vision seen by the ill-fated Earl of Surrey, in the mirror huge and high of Cornelius; the vision being “That fair and lovely form, the Lady Geraldine” (verses 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, canto vi.). Before travelling about so much I had a trunk full of letters referring to the ghost illusion, many treating it as a supernatural phenomenon, and not an effect from natural causes. In about four months my secretary wrote at least 1,000 letters in answer to those addressed to me.