information respecting your past or other people's past and future lives, together with full details of the doings of the departed in those other spheres of heaven or hell which they adorn or illumine respectively, may be obtained at the lowest rates, and with only that reasonable delay which results from the exigencies of a letter-code. For the "spirits" of the table, be it understood, are unable to communicate with earth except by taps and movements for "yes" or "no," or by rapping out numbers; so that they have to signify their meaning, snailwise, letter by letter. The "spirit" of the Planchette will indeed write you out sentences; but to that, like the actor in melodrama, I will return anon. In the stock _séances_, I know, spirits materialise themselves and glide white-sheeted through darkened rooms. But as my own _séances_ and "spirits" were personally conducted by myself, the optical illusions of Messrs. Maskelyne & Cook, the Pepper's Ghost of the dear old Polytechnic, had no opportunity of putting in an appearance. My spooks did nothing but answer questions, so that the very suggestion that they were spirits came entirely from me. In fact, they do but dance to the "medium's" piping; and should he suggest that they are methylated, the chances are that not a few would cheerfully acquiesce in this description of themselves. In short, it is only the prepossession, the pathetic prejudice, in favour of visitors from other worlds that leads at all to the thought of "spirits," drawing such a red herring across the track that the average observer, who is nothing if not unobservant, has all his partisan faculties of mis-observation brought into full play on behalf of the spirit-world. Doubtless the actual presence of "spirits" is the cheapest way of accounting for the phenomena. But one might as well call in "spirits" to explain the dancing of a kettle-lid. Not till every natural hypothesis has been exhausted is the scientific observer entitled to call in the supernatural. And in reality all that has to be explained is the mechanical movements of tables under certain specified conditions, the said movements having an apparent relation to will and intelligence. First of all, what moves the table?