Pg. 481

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 No. 628.-VOL. XXII.] FOR THE WEEK ENDING SATURDAY, JUNE 18, 1853. [Sixpence { ^with supplement, Gratis           uKAIlS.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 THE MYSTERY OF THE TABLES.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 The matter-of fact people of the nineteenth century have plunged all at once into the bottomless deeps of spiritualism. Railroads, steam, and electricity, and the indubitable wonders which they have wrought, have not proved powerful enough to supersede and destroy that strong innate love of the supernatural which seems mplanted in the human mind. Thousands of people in Europe and America are turning tables, and obstinately refusing to believe that physical and mechanical means are in any way concerned in the process. Hats, too, are turned, as well as the heads that wear them. But the greatest mystery has taken up its abode in and about the tea-table. The spirits that used to rap in the old days of the Jameses and the Charleses, rapped upon the walls and the ceilings, and made strange noises in the chimneys; but the spirits that rap in the days of Victoria prefer to rap upon rosewood or upon mahogany, and to haunt the under sur­faces of round tables. The delusion of a few threatens to become the mania of the many; and the folly, like many others which preceded it, has become epidemic, and seized upon the people like the grippe or the cholera-morbus. It is in vain that we boast of the progress of education. We are little, if any, wiser than our ancestors. The love of the marvel­lous is not to be eradicated by the schoolmaster. There are multitudes of hard-headed business-like people, safely to be trusted in any matter of commerce or of money—people who can reason, and argue, and detect the flaws and the contradictions in state­ments and theories which they do not approve—who continually wear some pet absurdity of their own. They hug it like a garment, and refuse to shuffle it off till they can robe themselves in another absurdity not a whit better than the old one, except in the gloss of its novelty and in the fashion of its cut. Some­thing of the kind is always occurring to excite the laughter of those who smile, and the tears of those who weep, at the follies of humanity. Neither Democritus nor Heraclitus need lack disciples

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 in our day. It is not only the ignorant and the vulgar, but the educated and the refined who yield themselves up, the un­suspecting, if not the eager, victims of self-deception. In fact, it may be asserted that the lower classes—men and women who battle with the sternest realities of life—are less apt than the wealthier and more luxurious to seek excitement in the wonderful, and to feed their credulity with the incomprehensible. It has been so in all ages. The days of witchcraft had scarcely passed away when the idle and the fashionable listened with keen cu­riosity to the wonderful stories related in the ” Sadducismus Triumphatus,” and swallowed with open mouths the re­ports of the spirit-rappings at the house of Mr. Mom- pesson. About the same time (two hundred years ago) appeared Valentine Greatraks, with his sympathetic salve, which cured the most desperate hurts—not by application to the wound, but to the sword or the pistol which caused it. Valentine Greatraks had thousands of believers ; and to have doubted of the marvellous cures which he effected would have been to run the risk of being scouted from good society. The famous metallic tractors of Dr. Haygarth, introduced sixty or seventy years ago, were a nine- days wonder, and were thought to have revolutionised the science of medicine, until it was found that wooden tractors, painted to imitate metallic ones, were as good as the genuine articles, and that neither had any effect, except upon the hypochondriacal and the weak-minded. Mr. St. John Long, at a comparatively recent period, rubbed the backs of the wealthy, and was grow­ing rich by the process, until an unforeseen, and, to him, unwelcome casualty brought him within the grip of the law, and caused his fashionable theory and his extensive practice to explode amid popular disgust. The Cock-lane Ghost, the spirit- rappings of Stockwell, and the dancing porridge-pots of Bal- darroch, all had their day and their believers. We cite these cases at random, and might select hundreds of others that are familiar to those who have made the credulity of the multitude their study. There is nothing too absurd for the belief both of the ignorant and the educated. There is no system of miscalled philosophy, espe­cially if it meddle with the business of the physician, that is too outrageous for encouragement, or too ridiculous for admiration.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 In an age which has been called pre-eminently practical and material, dead superstitions start out of their graves, and squeak and jabber in our streets. The haunted house rears its head nex door to the Mechanics’ Institute; and in the same town in which a Faraday is lecturing upon the newly-discovered truths of science, a clever adventuress calls up ghosts for a fee, and pre­tends to reveal the ineffable secrets of another life. The old fables of witchcraft and demoniacal possession are surpassed by the modern marvels which we are called upon to believe under the pe­nalty of being denounced as Materialists and Atheists. The extra­ordinary results obtained by science in our day have ceased to excite the same lively interest as of yore. Those who feed upon the highly- seasoned fare of the preternatural, are like the daughters of the horse-leech, and their cry is “Give, give!” Even clairvoyance, opening as it does so vast a field of inquiry to those who consider how fearfully and wonderfully man is made, fails to unfold mysteries enough to satisfy the daring neophytes of the nineteenth centur . Magnetism and electricity are great, they admit; but the human will, they assert, is greater. Electricity in Dover can rend the rock at Calais; but the all-potent will of man—either travelling upon electricity, or using it as a weapon—can leave this paltry world behind, and soar amid the planets and fixed stars, or, if it choose to stay upon the Earth, can become as veritable a power as any mechanical or physical force that was ever stirred into activity by the ingenuity of an Archimedes or a Watt. Not only can it accomplish such small feats as turning tables and hats, and making crockery dance upon shelves; but it can communicate with departed spirits, and call them from the interlunar spheres (which are no longer vacant in modem philosophy), to answer the most impertinent questions. Where shall we find any one so deaf to reason, so blind against proof, so callous to argument, so independent of demonstration, so utterly careless of evidence,

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 HOUGOUMONT, ON THE FIELD OF WATERLOO. –SKETCHED IN 1853.—(SEE NEXT PAGE.)