igation made by the
medical gentlemen (after they left); and the sounds were distinctly heard,
which was allowed by the committee to be a far more satisfactory test, as
they could distinctly hear the sounds under the feet, and feel the floor
_jar_ while our feet were held nearly or quite a foot from the floor."

About this time, a suspicion that the "raps" were made by use of the toes,
first found expression, but it never seems to have been followed up to
the point of verification. Indeed, the secret seems to have been kept
absolutely for forty years, and was only revealed by the lips of Mrs.
Margaret Fox Kane.

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 seance, 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 w