lection the birth and death of these children
had occurred. She listened attentively to the close, and then quietly
informed him that both the spirits and himself were in error, for that
Henry was the elder and George died first. As these questions of age and
date were the strongest points made by him in his spiritual
consultation, and the points most relied upon to test the accuracy of
the replies, this revelation at once upset all his doubts and fears, and
restored him again to the faith of his fathers. He himself had always
believed the facts to be as he had heard them from the medium, they
having, by some means, been reversed in his mind in the absence of any
other knowledge in the premises than that derived from hearsay, and that
too long gone by.

Now, in this instance, the mind of the medium was clearly _en rapport_
with that of the inquirer, and hence all the errors of the latter had
been closely followed. The facts were given not as they really were, but
as they existed in the mind of the inquirer. In other words, his mind
was read by the medium as an open book. And while, in this case, this
close copying of error at once precluded the idea of supernatural
agency, the facts are interesting as furnishing a new line of inquiry,
by showing that, in this instance at least--and if in this, why not in
others?--the phenomena of spiritualism were closely allied to those of
clairvoyance and mesmerism, and that the path of investigation into all
these mysteries may be pursued by one and the same course of reasoning.

But whether the cause of these mysteries is to be found in jugglery, in
some subtile connection between mind and matter, in animal magnetism, or
in any other of the thousand new branches of natural or mental science,
it must in the end be found--if found at all--to depend upon purely
natural laws--laws fixed and undeviating in the very constitution of
things, and which would have worked as well a thousand years ago as
to-day. The supernatural is entirely excluded from the investigation,
for that is a world beyond humanity's ken, into which no mortal may
peer. If the world of disembodied spirits have any connection whatever
with these wonderful and mystical phenomena, the question must ever
remain as perplexing and mysterious as it is to-day.

But human intellect is progressive. Age after age brings man nearer to
the comprehension of the myriad wonders that surround him, though he
must ever remain, while fe