For his own sake we are prone to wish that our personal friend had recognized that subsequent to the time of his early manhood, when he delivered and published Lectures upon Witchcraft, and pondered upon its producing agents and causes, phenomena, like the marvelous ones of former days, had been transpiring in great abundance all over our land, and that no less a man than Dr. Robert Hare, of Philadelphia, the correspondent and peer of Faraday, Silliman, and others of that class, had, by rigid and exact processes of physical science, actually _demonstrated_ that some occult force, moved by an intelligence that could and did understand and comply with verbal requests, repeatedly lifted and lowered the arms of scale-beams, and made bodies weigh more or weigh less than their normal weight, at his mental request. The same had been done by Dr. Luther V. Bell and a band of press reporters in 1857. Such forces, if taken into account by this historian, would have required a reconstruction and vast modifications of his long-cherished theory of explanation, and have called for an immense expenditure of labor and thought. Ease and retention of long-cherished notions are seductive to man. It was easier for the historian to ignore the discovery that natural laws or forces had always permitted unseen agents to come among us, whose workings the human brain had long, but unsatisfactorily, been laboring to trace to adequate causes,--easier to continue to assume that insufficient causes, lackered in glowing rhetoric, might answer a while longer,--easier to still hug the dream that little girls and young misses, mainly guileless and docile in all their previous days, could and did, without professional instruction and of a sudden, become proficients in the production of complicated schemes and feats rivaling and even surpassing the most astonishing ones of highest legerdemain, of jugglery, and of histrionic art combined,--easier to fancy that these girls rebelled against and set at defiance parental, medical, ministerial, and friendly authority, acted like brutes and villains, turned all things upside down with a vengeance, in the midst of a community clear headed and not easily befooled,--yes, it was easier to retain all these _outré_ suppositions than to set aside a pet theory and reconstruct history in conformity with requirements of discoveries which _others_ had made in advance of this historian, and by the use of which he could have furnished a truly philosophical and satisfactory solution of all the marvels of ancient witchcraft. Infatuation still lingers on the earth, blinding many bright eyes.