called out," What the devil do you want ?" and how there ensued the most tremendous knocking at the doors, and that the wardrobe seemed to burst open and all the pieces fell on the floor, and a great cabinet was moved out and pushed back again; and to add to this dismay the dogs, kept in a back hall, set up the most terrified howls. I had not been disturbed that night, but I could see that the amateur electrician and scientist was in a quandary, so I carefully concealed the triumphs I was feeling over the defeat of one of "superior sex," who had so much contempt for spirits. I reminded him of the general invitation he had issued, but every week something disturbed him that he could not account for.

On a Sunday afternoon on that October, a relative had called, and we were all returning from seeing him drive away, when my brother, who was out also, begged us to go quickly and look in his room. I ran, and my husband hurried, but the room was without any visible visitor. Brother explained in a distracted sort of way, that the lady was leaning half out the window, and that she wore a white gown. Next week he begged me to let one of my big dogs stay with him at night. I did so, but the third night he saw the dog crouch and stare and then act as if driven around the room. Brother saw nothing, but heard a sort of rustle as tissue paper makes, and the poor dog howled and tried to hide, and never again would that dog go to that room. At this period the doors would open for the wheeled chair, and the knocking continued as before.

And this narrative now deals with November 1886, when my husband came home from a journey with a chill, seeming only slightly indisposed, and he proposed to keep quiet a few days. Next morning after breakfast he and brother were discoursing on some of nature's scientific secrets, as usual, when both heard a great crash in my private room, on the other side of the hall, and called me from the veranda to ask what it could be. On opening my door I found two large paintings and my mantle clock lying on the rug. One of my pictures was broken across and its frame shattered, but the other was not injured, and the clock was ticking as it lay. There was no living thing in the room. A few days after I was entering the parlor, and a heavily framed copy of Guido's Magdalen fell in front of me: it was not injured.

My husband became alarmingly ill, and all was confusion. People were in the house to condole or assist; and the night watches whispered of strange sounds heard, and all at once the neighborhood knew of it. Doors opened and shut oftener than ever; bells rang, and I have seen a mulatto valet turn a green white as doors opened by invisible hands. The maid servants went to sleep at a gentleman's house near us. And one night as I took a little sleep, as did the patient, and a male nurse,brother was in the sick room adjoining mine,-lamps were lighted, fires in open grates were flickering brightly, when a tall lady in white walked in from my room, bent over the patient, and turned to go. Then brother saw it was the lady herself. He saw her pass into my room again, saw my clock point to twenty minutes to 2 o'clock A. M., heard a vibrating blow on all the windows that was answered by the furniture in the room. During the next fourteen days I was up every night by my husband's bed, as he became more and more violent, as I was best able to recall the wavering equilibrium of that great brain.

My husband died on the 27th of November, 1886, and I was almost deserted. It is true I had two quaking men to sleep in the house, and a bed was made up for the maid in my children's room and mine. A Newfoundland dog and terrier also slept in it; but the promenade went on in the hall every night; doors opened and shut, and bells rang as before; and the lady appeared in a corner of brother's room one night,

and very slowly, with warning finger pointed at him, entered my room through the closed door. Brother called loudly for help, but I did not hear, and he prepared to leave, as he declared nothing could induce him to stay "in such an infernal house" longer. For the few days he remained, someone must stay in the room with him; and at the last moment, just as he was to be lifted up to be taken to the carriage, a silvery peal rang out; and he went home, leaving me and my little girls to find company as best we could his stay being just four months.

At the last, he confessed there was a great mystery somewhere. Just once again I was waked up by a loud knocking on the top of my bed; maid, children, dogs, all heard it, and really I opened my eyes, expecting to see the lady, but I did not. That was the first of January, 1887, and two weeks later I was safely here in Canada, free from disturbance, except the cares of sorrowing widowhood, which is of this life only.

P. S. In reading this over, I find that I have not mentioned the fact that the lady seen by my brother was a former owner and mistress of the mansion. She had been dead long before my time, but was remembered and described by an old resident as the exact counterpart of the lady. I also learned that she had been seen by members of her own family, and that was the reason why they could not live in it, and sold it. I also inquired what sort of person the poor woman was in this life. I found she was an oppressor of the poor-greedy, mean, cruel.

I have neglected to state that we heard the most heartrending moans sometimes -oh! o-oh! o-o-oh!-- and we would forget, because it seemed so real, and run to each others' rooms, expecting to find them in a death agony.

Would that such "hauntings" might occur in the homes of our special investigators, but meteoric stones do not always fall when and where we please, and we cannot yet insure the development of fireballs.

I have referred to the divergent views of Messrs. Myers and Podmore concerning phantasms of the dead. According to either view, the veridical "ghost" is not a material form, however tenuous, but it is a sensory hallucination produced in the percipient by the telepathic action of some other mind. We have hardly crossed the threshold of our investigation, but even in the present stage it seems evident that "ghostly sights and "ghostly" sounds and phantasmal experiences generally, form part of a large class of phenomena, for which there is some testimony from all ages, and which are now forcing an acknowledgment of their existence from the scientific world. We cannot hope to explain a part completely until we know the whole. Can we even dimly descry the limits of our own mentation in its entirety? Léonie is hypnotized by Mr. Janet, and another stratum of the woman's consciousness emerges, Léontine. But Léontine on more than one occasion is terrified by a disapproving voice that seems to come from without, and on being hypnotized

into a deeper trance, a profounder stratum of the woman's consciousness emerges,- Léonore, that claims to be the counsellor of Léontine. Of all this, Léonie, the waking woman, knows nothing, yet Léonie, Léontine, and Léonore are one. How little in truth we may know about the planes of our own being. How much less about their interactions with the planes of other beings. In quite another sense than the poet meant, we move about in worlds not realized, and, similarly, we who move do not realize ourselves. In the process of evolution, with the increase of complexity between creature and environment, we are gaining also an increase of knowledge of that complexity. As in the macrocosm, so in the microcosm, the view is widening all the way; the stars that once were interpreted as the gold headed nails driven into the dome of a solid firmament, have now receded into the abysmal depths of a limitless evolving heaven; and no more than the earth is the centre of the universe, may the tiny window of sense-consciousness through which we daily peep and pry, be the true measure of the soul of man.

VACCINATION: A SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY.

BY CHARLES CREIGHTON, M. D.

SCIENTIFIC authority is, in the nature of things, a most powerful instrument, whether it be established in error or in truth. Once established, the authority of science will be apt to secure absolute deference and obedience, most of all from the class who like to express their opinion in all matters nonscientific. The right and duty of everyone to think for himself or herself strictly applies, both in practice and in theory, to those matters in which we hold differing views of the first principles, according to our personal peculiarities, cast of mind, habits of thought, or even physical constitution. But in scientific matters, which are on a positive basis, are measurable and ponderable, capable of being turned over and over, probed, pulled about, and, above all, subjected to the verification of experiment, authority appears to be in its proper place, and the presumption is strong that it could hardly have been established without going through a trying ordeal at the hands of learned societies, University faculties, and the few who are competent to judge. It is precisely to scientific opinion that Locke's seventeenth-century language still applies with as much force as ever. "A great part of mankind are, by the natural and unalterable state of things in this world, and the constitution of human affairs, unavoidably given over to invincible ignorance of those proofs on which others build, and which are necessary to establish those opinions." Sir George Cornwall Lewis, in his essay on "The Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion," nowhere feels himself on surer ground than when he is dealing with the authority of the physical and biological science. Recognizing, as we all must do, that it is natural to the mind to rest on authority, to render a willing obedience to a good leader, this eminent critical philosopher and serious Whig statesman was not less desirous to find an ideal of authority than if he had been a Churchman, extolling revelation and the continuity of doc

trine. But it is only in the physical and biological science that Sir G. C. Lewis discovers a kind of authority wholly satisfactory. There, at all events, it was safe to conclude that such and such an opinion was "sound"; that the judges who had pronounced upon it were "competent," and that it was a fitting opinion to be "diffused by the influence of authority."

Medical science he admits to be "a partial exception" to the general rule that the authority of science is so safeguarded in its process of establishment as to be trustworthy. Perhaps if he had been familiar with the history of medical doctrines, he would have gone farther than "a partial exception." The history of medical opinions and practices is not much heeded by the English-speaking profession of the present day. Somehow we are half aware that a review of them would be the review of a good many grinning skeletons, and we prefer to let the skeletons remain in their closet with the door shut. We can hardly help being aware of this from the references to medicine by contemporary satirists,-Montaigne, Molière, Le Sage, Swift, and many more both earlier and later. There is a pleasing belief held in some superior circles of the profession that all these vagaries of fashion in medical theory and practice came to an end at a date not fixed within a year or two, but somewhere about the second quarter of the nineteenth century; that medicine then entered upon a career of cumulative progress, advancing steadily onwards, it may be in a spiral line more than in a straight line, but at any rate never along a wrong road and then back again, as in the bad times of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It remains to be seen whether we are really out of the wood, when the history is written in the twentieth century. The historian of that time, however satisfied with the prospect around himself, will probably find occasion to remark that we of the present had begun to halloo too soon. So long as the Jennerian doctrine and practice of vaccination remains with us, we can hardly be said to have got entirely away from the eighteenth century. In nothing else has the profession of to-day shown so much loyalty to the pledges given by its predecessors. The history of vaccination from its beginning to its present position is a refreshing illustration of the truth that medical science is human first and scientific afterwards. When the French Minister of the Interior, in 1803, rec