Dr. Luther V. Bell and Nathaniel J. Bowditch, for example, after their protracted, careful and elaborate test-examinations, what can we trust? A single instance from Dr. Bell will serve as a specimen. He had been forced, as the physician of the insane, to investigate phenomena that had brought many of them under his care, and he had prosecuted it for some two years, in company with eminent associates, and with the most rigid tests. On the occasion referred to, he was assured he should be put in communication with any spirit friend he chose to question, and he fixed upon his brother who, having been dead twenty-five years and never having lived in Massachusetts, was unknown to any one in the region where the experiment was tried. To show that there was no mere guessing in the case, it is necessary only to read the questions and answers as recorded in detail, bearing in mind also that some of the facts were known to no other person in Massachusetts, some even to no other person living, than himself, that he did not mention aloud the name of the person he called for, and that some of the correct answers, at least, seemed at first absurd alike to the bystanders and to the medium. But he shall tell his own story:

"A gentleman at my elbow said to me, 'You need not speak the name of any friend you may call upon. Put your question mentally.' I did so, and then said, 'Is the spirit I have just thought of present?' Answer, 'Yes.' 'Give me some proof by indicating the year of your decease.' I passed the pencil secretly over the numerals, and the figures 1-8-3-0 were [by raps] successively indicated (1830). This was the year. I then remarked aloud, 'Coincidences are not proofs. Confirm the fact of your presence by stating the place at which you were at your decease.' There was then rapped out on the alphabet the letters t-h-i-b-a-u-d-e-a-u. When it had proceeded thus far, the medium and all the others acquainted with the processes exclaimed, That is no word; it is a mere jumble of letters. Go back and recommence.' 'No,' said I, "let him go on and see what he will make of it. The rapping continued; v-i-1-1-e forming the word Thibeaudeauville, a small town in Louisiana, near which my brother lived on a plantation; and at which he received and sent his letters. The fact of his death at or near that place could not have been known probably to any other person in Massachusetts except myself, and years had passed by since it had passed through my mind." [On another occasion, to the same.] "When you went to Paris as a medical student, who was your fellow-passenger?

Answer-Wells. Question-What was 'your Christian name? A. John D. Q. The name of the vessel? A. Brio Caravan. Q. On. that voyage to France, where did you land? A. Holland. Q. You once obtained a medical prize; what was the subject? A Small pox. Q. Where was our last interview in life? A. In Boston. Q. Where in Boston? A. City Hotel. Q. What were you doing? A. Preparing to mount my horse for a journey. [The place and circumstances of this interview, twenty-five years before, Dr. Bell avers, he "had never communicated to any person."] Q. A journey! Where? A. To the South. Q. What part of the South? A. Natchez. Q. Who went with you? A. James Dinsmore and Stephen Miner. Q. Who was with you when you died? A. Dinsmore, Sears, Whitney. Now (says Dr. Bell) I knew the true replies to every one of these questions except the last, and they were all truly given. I had, of course, some anxiety, as all the others had been answered truly, to ascertain how the other one would prove. Fortunately, Mr. D. was still alive in Kentucky, and I wrote to him. He replied that he was not present at the death, as I had always supposed he was, and mentioned who were. Neither of them was of those named."

Here the responses were most remarkable, but they precisely echoed the knowledge and opinions of the person in communication, including his precise mistakes. Acting on this clue, Dr. Bell then prosecuted a series of investigations (of which the convincing details are given), and thereby proved conclusively that this was precisely the law of the "spirit" responses it responded to the inquirer's thought, stating correctly what he knew, ignorant where he was ignorant, wrong where he was wrong, and gaining knowledge when he did. Now these statements were made in writing to the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Insane Hospitals at Washington and Boston. They were carefully and deliberately made after the most searching inquiries, and under the full sense of professional responsibility. The profession, as we suppose, would pronounce his testimony just as unimpeachable as that of Dr. Hammond. And while the one simply asserts that he has not seen such and such things, the other declares that he has. N. I. Bowditch, Esq., an equally unimpeachable witness, as we suppose, verifies the statements and conclusions from his own separate experience, confirmed by that of many other witnesses, for which we must refer to Pres. Mahan's book.

Now we can not well refuse testimony which would be regarded as of the very highest character in court. But so far as it is valid to establish the fact of such a rapport between mind and mind, it is equally valid and positive to show that there is only a relation between two spirits here in the body, and that departed spirits, good or bad, have nothing to do with the case. And we challenge the production of any valid testimony that goes further than this. Mr. Sargent, indeed, thinks he has found one unanswerable refutation of this position in the alleged fact that Charles H. Foster could, with the tips of his fingers, ascertain the name written on any one of several papers rolled up into pellets and mingled so promiscuously that no one present could know which was which. If this be a fact, we have testimony to precisely the same process, in the case of the cataleptic patient of M. Despine, already mentioned.

The experiments of Dr. Bell, Mr. Bowditch, and many others, conclusively show that the so-called spirit responses are nothing but echoes of other human minds then and there present in the flesh. Our limits admonish us not to protract this discussion; but we will add in brief that the result thus reached, and, indeed, that absolutely the responses can not be from departed spirits, is abundantly confirmed by other considerations, such as these:

The fact that the responses through the medium have again and again been deliberately controlled by the will of persons in communication, so as to utter a series of falsehoods and to persist in them, in accordance with the precise dictation of the directing will. Even the spiritist Ballou admits that this often takes place (Rogers, p. 188); while this process was deliberately carried through over and over at the house of Rev. T. Starr King, in Boston, as well as on other occasions (Mahan, p. 199, seq.) An inquirer with a strong will can make the same "spirit" contradict himself flatly any number of times in succession, and say any thing he chooses to compel him to. Mr. Bowditch and Dr. H. T. Bigelow compelled the spirit to say that its name was Miserable Humbug, that spirits live

on pork and beans, and a string of similar absurdities (Ib., p. 221;

The fact often proved (Ib., p. 177-8) that no matter what may be the summoned "spirit," whether of Bacon, a purely fictitious person, or even a beast or a stone, equally intelligent communications are received;

The fact that in repeated instances (Ib., 176-7) responses have come from persons supposed to be dead, giving all the circumstances of the decease, when afterwards the persons proved to be alive;

The fact that the communications are so discordant with one another; not merely of different spirits, or of the same spirit at different times, but the same spirit on the same occasion and in answer to the same questioner. A gentleman in Ohio, e.g., summoned the spirit of his mother, and by causing his thoughts to pass through the several transitions, he found the spirit to be successively a Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, Universalist and Unitarian (Ib., 187);

The fact, abundantly proved by Dr. Bell, that the alleged spirit can not tell anything unknown to the inquirer, however well known to the real spirit (Ib., 219);

The fact that during this quarter of a century of communion. with "spirits," no scientific, historic or useful fact, otherwise unknown, has ever yet been made known to men through this channel;

The fact that all the spirit rhapsodies and utterances are so completely marked by the earthly sources from which they are derived. They clearly belong to the circles or the persons with whom they originated. All the various spirits speaking through Judge Edmonds or Dr. Hare served up but a slightly different hash of Edmonds and of Hare. The thirty-seven persons who utter themselves in "Strange Visitors," "through a clairvoyant in an abnormal or trance state," have a wonderful consent of view, under a thin veil of diverse phraseology. Dr. Lyman Beecher describes Sabbath worship "as waves of magnetic light extending into the world of spirits," and waxes eloquent on "sitting under the leafy trees" on the sacred day,

with "discources on morals and science in parks and woods," etc. And this is one prominent carnal mark, that they almost invariably talk rationalism and Liberal Christianity. Mr. Sargent admits this fact (Planchette, p. 298). So earthly are the utterances that the spirit of John Quincy Adams on one occasion rapped out, "you must beleve, you must not dout" (Rogers, p 195).

Finally, the great and often grotesque incongruity between the utterances and the real character and known sentiments of the persons represented. The latest specimen we have seen, "Strange Visitors," is chiefly a sickish babble of spiritism, written with a dreamy but ineffectual effort at diversity of style. Irving prates of "thought-electricity," and such sad stuff; Archbishop Hughes eulogizes the "Spiritualistic Religion," and speaks of returning to the earth "to rap, write and speak through media;" Napoleon the First "embraces in spirit" Napoleon III., assuring him (in 1869) that "France and Napoleon are inseparable;" Professor Olmstead drivels that "spirit is matter;" and even that valiant opposer of the whole system, Sir David Brewster, is made to grind in this same dogmill. The same remark applies to all the spirit communications we have seen, however respectable the channel. Imagine that stern old nullifier, John C. Calhoun, that man of incarnate logic and one idea, coming back as recorded by Judge Edmonds (Spiritualism, p. 427), to call for three bells and a guitar, then direct a drawer to be put under the table, press a bell on the foot and ankle of N. P. Talmadge, knock so strongly under the table as to raise the table every time, play on the guitar, and send the communication, " that is my hand which touches you. J. C. Calhoun;" imagine him on another occasion calling for "Hail Columbia," and beating time by raps, then calling for the third chapter of John, verses 8, 11, 19 and 34, making an appointment for another meeting, at which he directs his friends to sharpen a pencil, and appoints still another meeting that he may simply say to them, "I'm with you still;"--and if, as the scripture says, a living dog is better than a dead lion, tell us how much superior was the live nullifier to this dead monkey.