head very high, and others would have abandoned themselves in despair to the current superstitions of the day. The truth incompletely demonstrated would have been treated as a lie, and, what is worse, would have ended by becoming such. But thank God! it will not be so now. Our meetings were real and formal seances, to which the best hours of the day were given. The results, verified with the most minute care, were embodied in formal and official declarations. I have these _proces-verbaux_ before me now, and it seems to me that I could not do better than to take up one after another and extract from each the interesting observations it may contain. I shall thus follow the method of certain historians, and relate the truth rather than systematize it. The reader will, as it were, follow us step by step. He will examine and check my various assertions by comparing them; he will form his own conviction, and will judge whether my proofs have that character of frequent occurrence, of persistency, of progressive development which false discoveries, based upon some fortuitous and poorly described coincidence, never have. These are promising premises. We shall see whether the promises will be kept. The report (or minutes) of the first meeting bears the date of September 20, 1853. Numerous seances had been held before, but it had not been thought necessary to write down the results. What those results were will be seen by the following brief account: