- haunted by noises in the night. -- Heavy marble up tables pois- lar developments in New York. - Freaks of a knob of a door bell. Fiery flashes, and fiery smacks, on kissing. - Blows in the mouth from a speaking tube. - Account of two girls that could move tables without touching them. Effects of storms on raising tables. Electrical circles in Cincinnati.- Case of a lady in Strasburg.— Power of giving electrical shocks to persons at a distance. Singular effects of the northern lights on a lady. 224 - - - Chairs, tables, and persons moved. — Biological table-liftings in East Boston." Mediums," as visible human operators.-Re- solve of the " rappers" at Poughkeepsie. — The unseen agent that moves tables, beds, &c.-Dancing plates, knives and forks, &c. 264 Delivering speeches; imitating orators. Imitating unseen letters, signatures, and languages. — Suspicions concerning Professor Bush.- Singular feat attributed to spirits. -No difficulty in raising chairs or tables. - Spirits shown by Dancing light seen in Southboro, Massachusetts. - Ignis fatuus seen by Dr. Derham. - Corpusants seen by mariners.— Dampier's Othello winning Desdemona by conjuration. - Execution of a The invisible lady in Boston. The invisible girl in London. — Joice Heth, the India rubber woman. - Professor Grimes's dis- - Men turned into tigers by eating a certain root, and turned back THE SPIRIT LAND INTRODUCTION. THE object of this treatise upon some of the various errors of the past and present ages is to explain their nature investigate their origin describe their injurious effects and to offer and recommend the necessary measures for their banishment. Most persons, even those who have been well educated, can call to mind the avidity with which, in their days of childhood, they listened to the nursery tales of giants, dwarfs, ghosts, fairies, and witches. The effects of these juvenile impressions are not easily effaced from the mind, and the impressions themselves are but rarely, if ever, forgotten. To doubt, in former times, the power of charms, and the veracity of omens, and ghost stories, was deemed little less than atheism. The terror caused by them imbittered the lives of persons of all ages. It either served to shut them out of their own houses, or deterred them from going abroad after it was dark. The room in which the head of a family died was for a long time untenanted; particularly if he died without a will, or was supposed to have entertained any peculiar religious opinions. If any disconsolate maiden, or love-crossed bachelor, became the instrument of their own death, the room where the fatal deed was committed was rendered forever uninhabitable, and not unfrequently nailed up. If a drunken farmer, returning from market, fell from his horse, and by the fall broke his own neck, that spot, ever after, was haunted and impassable. In truth, there was scarcely a bylane or cross-way but had its ghost, which appeared in the shape of a headless cow or horse. Ghosts of a higher degree rode in coaches, drawn by six headless horses, and driven by a headless coachman. As for the churchyards, the legitimate habitations of spectres, clothed all in white, the numbers who swarmed there equalled the living parishioners; and to pass such a place in the night was more perilous than the storming of Badajos. Confuted and ridiculed as these opinions have been, in later days, the seeds of them are still widely diffused, and at times attempt to spring up in all their earlier excess. In the year 1832, crowds of men, women, and children flocked to the village of Waltham, a few miles from Boston, to see a ghost which was said to make its appearance towards midnight, walking to and fro in a turf meadow, declaring itself, in unearthly tones, to be the spirit of a murdered man, whose bones lay in a mud hole near by. The excitement spread many miles around, and hundreds from the city and neighboring towns hied to the spot, with eyes agape, to behold the solemn visitor from the spirit world. And such was the credulity inspired in the minds of the people, that a clergyman in the vicinity declared from his pulpit, on the following Sabbath, that the awful crime of murder had been revealed by the spirit which had appeared in Waltham! Such is the excitability of the mind, and its tendency (notwithstanding the light that has been scattered abroad) to give credence to all the vagaries and nonsense of the darker ages. CHAPTER I. THE ORIGIN OF POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS. IGNORANCE of correct reasoning has undoubtedly given rise to many superstitions. Inductive reasoning teaches us to infer general conclusions from particular facts which have come under our observation. This definition may be illustrated by an example. You know that water boils on the application of a certain degree of heat. You have seen this experiment tried many times without a single failure. You therefore conclude that water will always boil on the application of this degree of heat, although you have seen it applied but to a small portion of the water in creation Thus you draw this general conclusion from the few particular facts which you have witnessed. But had you noticed several failures in the trial, your conclu. sions would have been doubtful. And if the experi ment had failed ninety-nine cases out of a hundred you would have adopted an opposite conclusion You would have said that the application of the |