“A pleasant debate followed. Mr. Petit proposed to refer the petition of the Spiritualists to three thousand clergymen. Mr. Weller proposed to refer it to the Committee on Foreign Relations, as it might be necessary to inquire whether or not when Americans leave this world they lose their citizenship. Mr. Mason proposed that it should be left to the Committee on Military affairs. General Shields himself said he had thought of proposing to refer the petition to the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, because there may be a possibility of establishing a spiritual telegraph between the material and spiritual worlds. The petition was finally, by a decisive vote, laid upon the table. The table did not, as we learn, tip in indignation at this summary disposal of Spiritualism in the Senate, by which we must infer that the ‘spirits,’ if there were any in the Senate at that time, endorsed its action and considered the same all right.”
I might here enter into a description of the various forms of modern spiritualistic representations. It would be a waste of time. I wish, however, to allude more particularly just here to one of the “evidences” which Mrs. Ann Leah Underhill apparently values most highly in connection with the claim of inherent and hereditary “mediumistic” powers residing in certain individuals and families. This is the somewhat noted so-called exhibition of “mediumistic” ability by a child of Mrs. Kate Fox Jencken, a babe, only about six weeks old at the time that it began. It is needless to go into all the details of the wonders attributed to little “Ferdie” Jencken, now a fine lad of fifteen, which rest wholly upon the testimony of persons who were interested in magnifying them to the greatest extent. Shadowy forms are said to have appeared to his nurse while she was watching him. At three months he was said to have articulated “Mamma!” But the cap of the climax is the feat he is said to have performed when not six months old. As he was restless one day, his mother gave him a piece of blotting paper and a pencil to play with. He made some marks on the paper and dropped it. When his mother picked it up she exclaimed to Mrs. Underhill, the only other person present:
“See here, he was written something.”
It is pretended that on one side of the blotting paper was the message:
“Grandma is here.
“Boysie.”
Later and up to the close of his first year, he was said to write other messages, but all under like circumstances.
Mrs. Underhill lays great stress upon these “manifestations” in two portions of her work.
The simple and only comment to be made upon them is, that Mrs. Catherine Fox Jencken now declares that they were fraudulent. The messages were in every case written upon the paper before it was placed in the baby’s hands, the mother knowing, of course, that a child a few months old would not retain anything very long in its grasp, that those who chanced to be present would not observe, unless previously warned, whether it was wholly blank or not, and that the picking up of the paper from the floor would give ample opportunity to turn undermost the side on which the child may have really scratched some unmeaning marks.
So much for that and kindred marvels of infant “mediumship.”
“Ferdie” Jencken, so far as is known, has never, since that early period of his existence, exhibited any “mediumistic power.”