I cannot refrain from quoting in this place an incident from the record of the common enemy, which further illustrates the imbecile audacity with which they parade their abominable fraud before the eyes of sensible persons. At a séance, in which wonderous things were done under a table, around which the company including Mrs. Fish and one of her sisters were closely seated, one, Mr. Stringham, apparently a doubter, asked:
“May I leave the table while the others remain, that I may look and see the bells ringing?”
The “spirits” answered:
“What do you think we require you to sit close to the table for?”
And the veracious writer adds:
“When spirits make these physical demonstrations, they are compelled to assume shapes that human eyes must not look upon.”
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
I should be guilty of an historical omission did I not also notice a somewhat formal investigation made by a committee of Harvard Professors and others, appointed to satisfy the exigencies of a newspaper controversy in Boston in 1857, and which Mrs. Ann Leah Fox Brown and Miss Catherine Fox attended. The results were wholly unsatisfactory and inconclusive from a scientific standpoint, though the moral effect of this outcome was strongly against the spiritualists, who were, of course, bound to prove their positive side of the case, and failed ignominiously to do so. The committee consisted of Professors Agassiz, Pierce and Horsford, Mr. George Lunt, editor of the Boston Courier, Dr. A. B. Gould, Mr. Allen Putnam, Dr. H. F. Gardner and Mr. G. W. Rains. The last three were pronounced spiritualists.
Professor Agassiz, who in particular had studied mesmerism and so-called clairvoyance most carefully, and who believed to some extent in the former, declared with emphasis that there was an easy physiological explanation of all the effects that the “Fox Sisters,” or any other “rappers,” produced. The raps caused by the “Fox Sisters” on this occasion were but feeble and uncertain. When other “mediums” were under examination, the close watch kept upon them by the learned investigators seemed greatly to disconcert them and prevented the possibility of any pronounced “manifestations” taking place.
The Courier had issued a challenge offering five hundred dollars to any one who would “communicate a single word imparted to the ‘spirits,’” by its editor “in an adjoining room,” who would “read a single word in English, written inside a book or sheet of paper folded in such a manner as we may suggest; who would answer with the aid of all the higher intelligences he or she can invoke from the other world, three questions * * *;” and it added: