Oh, Moliere! why are you not present with us? But, in reality, you are here. Your genius has limned with ineffaceable lines that everlasting disease of venerable big-wigs and mouldy specialists,--disdain of the laity, respect for their fellow-members, idolatry of the past. A most singular deformity, this! And it appears in all ages, in various disguises, in the midst of all branches of human activity, now in the name of religion, now in that of medicine, and again in the name of science or of art. Yes, even surviving the wreck of revolutions which spare nothing, appearing even within the walls of learned academies the members of which write for the furtherance of the great movements of modern progress, one thing remains,--the spirit of partisanship, of cliques, the spirit of tradition, the superstitious regard for forms. Really, it would seem as if people must be still taking Bible oaths like those in the baccalaureate ceremony at the end of Moliere's _Malade Imaginaire_. M. Foucault is fond of this scene, and will therefore not take it ill if I recall to his mind a couple of stanzas: _Essere in omnibus Consultationibus Ancieni aviso, Aut bono, Aut mauvaiso._ --JURO! _De non jamais te servire De remediis alcunis Quam de ceux soulement doctae facultatis, Maladus dut-il crevare, Et mori de suo malo._ --JURO![55] If you don't call that a refusal to examine, I don't know what the words mean in good French. With such ingenious candor and with such authority did the Count Agenor de Gasparin express himself in the year 1854. It seems to me that the experiments made known in this volume furnish abundant evidence that he is right. Yet I have still friends, at the Institute, who smile with the utmost scorn when I ask their opinion on the phenomena of the levitation of tables, the movement of objects without perceptible cause, unexplained noises in haunted houses, communication of thought at a distance, premonitory dreams, and apparitions of the dying. Although these unexplained phenomena have undeniably been proved to be facts of occurrence, those learned friends of mine remain convinced that "such things as that are impossible." CHAPTER VII THE RESEARCHES OF PROFESSOR THURY The insufficient explanations of Chevreul and of Faraday, the scientific negations of Babinet, the conscientious experiments of the Count de Gasparin had led several scientists to study the question from the purely scientific point of view. Among them was a highly-gifted savant whom I visited at Geneva,--M. Marc Thury, professor of natural history and of astronomy in the Academy of that city. We are indebted to him for a remarkable and little known monograph,[56] which it is my duty to condense for this volume.