Fraud and muscular action! Here for instance is a fine opportunity to put them to the proof. We have just placed a weight on the table. This weight is inert and cannot be accessory to any device. Fraud is all around it perhaps, but it is not in the tubs of sand. This weight is equally divided among the three legs of the table, and they are going to prove it by each one rising in turn. The total load weighs 165 pounds, and we scarcely dare to increase it, for, as it is, it was enough, one day, to break our very solid table. Very well; now let someone try to move this weight. Since muscular action and fraud must explain everything, it will be easy for them to put the mass in motion. Now they cannot do it. Their fingers contract and the knuckles whiten without their obtaining a single levitation, whereas, some moments later, levitations will take place at the touch of the same fingers, which gently graze the table's top and make no effort at all, as any one may easily convince himself. Certain very ingenious scientific rules of measurement, for the invention of which I cannot claim the credit, put us in the way of translating into figures the effort which the rotation or levitation of the table demands, when loaded in the way just described. With the above-mentioned weight of 165 pounds, rotation is secured by means of a lateral traction of about 17-1/2 pounds, while levitation is only obtained by a perpendicular pressure of 132 pounds at least (which I will reduce, however, to 110, in deference to the presumed wishes of the critic, and on the supposition that the pressure might not be absolutely vertical). Several deductions are to be drawn from these figures. In the first place, muscular action may cause the table to turn, but it cannot lift it. As a matter of fact, the ten operators have one hundred fingers applied to its surface. Now, the vertical, or quasi-vertical, pressure of each finger cannot exceed twelve ounces on the average, the chain being composed as it is. They only develop, then, a total pressure of 66 pounds, which is quite insufficient to produce levitation. In the next place, this striking thing befalls, that the phenomenon which muscular action could easily produce is precisely the one that we most rarely and with the greatest difficulty obtain, and that the phenomenon which muscular action could not compass is the one the most habitually realized when the chain is formed. Why does not our involuntary impulse always make the table turn? Why should not our "fraud" always procure such a triumph? Why, as a general thing, do we only succeed in effecting that which is mechanically impossible?