< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu
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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
for their "scientific" investigation. Having a strong prepossession, however, in favor of the common-sense view that these performances were but the tricks of not very clever jugglers, and learning that this inquiry was to take place in a darkened room, and that the members of the committee must form a circle with joined hands, I at once declined to have any thing to do with it; on the ground that, to exclude the use of the eyes and hands, which the scientific investigator uses as his chief instruments of research, was to render the inquiry utterly nugatory. Now that the tricks of the Davenport brothers have been not merely imitated but surpassed by Messrs. Cooke and Maskelyne, I suppose that no truly "rational" person would appeal to them as evidence of "spiritual" agency.
6. During the meeting of the British Association at Belfast in 1874, a lady-medium of great repute held spiritualistic séances, at which she distributed flowers, affirmed to have been brought to her then and there by the spirits, fresh from the garden, with the dew of heaven upon them. As there was nothing more in this performance than is done every day by an ordinary conjurer, only the confidence entertained in the good faith of the medium could justify a belief in the "spiritual" transport of the flowers; but this belief, aided by the general "prepossession," had been implicitly accepted by many of the witnesses on such occasions. An inquisitive young gentleman, however, who was staying in the same house, and did not share in this confidence, found a basin-full of these flowers (hollyhocks) in a garret, with a decanter of water beside it; and strongly suspecting that they had been stored there with a view to distribution at the séance, and that the dew would be supplied, when wanted, from the decanter, he conveyed into the water a chemical substance (ferrocyanide of potassium), in quantity so small as not to tinge it, and yet to be distinctly recognizable by the proper test. On the subsequent application of this test (a per-salt of iron) to the flowers distributed by the "medium," they were found to give Prussian blue.—This is no piece of hearsay, but a statement which I have in the hand of the gentleman himself, with permission to make it public.

But every form of "prepossession" has an involuntary and unsuspected action in modifying the memorial traces of past events, even when they were originally rightly apprehended. A gradual change in our own mode of viewing them will bring us to the conviction that we always so viewed them; as we recently saw in the erroneous account which Earl Russell gave of his action as Foreign Secretary in the negotiations which preceded the Crimean War. His subsequently acquired perception of what he should have done at a particular juncture wrought him up to the honest belief that he really did it. To few persons of experience in life has it not happened to find their distinct impressions of past events in striking discordance with some contemporary narrative, as perhaps given in a letter of their own. An able lawyer told me not long since that he had had occasion to look into a deed which he had not opened for twenty years, but which he could have sworn to contain certain clauses; and, to his utter astonishment, the clauses were not to be found in it. His habitual conception of the purpose of the deed had constructed what answered to the actual memorial trace.

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