r 16, 1868. He took exception to a
point in Lord Lindsay's grammar, he asked why Lord Lindsay did not
cite the two other observers, and he said (what I doubt) that the
observations were made by moonlight. So Lord Lindsay had said; but the
curious may consult the almanack. Even in a fog, however, people in a
room can see a man come in by the window, and go out again, 'head
first, with the body rigid,' at a great height above the ground.

[Footnote 23: _Contemporary Review_, January 1876.]

[Footnote 24: _Contemporary Review_, vol. xxvii. p. 286.]

Mr. Podmore has suggested that Home thrust his head and shoulders out
of the window, and that the three excited friends fancied the rest;
but they first saw him in the air outside of the window of their
room.[25] Nothing is explained, in this case, by Dr. Carpenter's
explanation. Dr. Carpenter (1871) discredited the experiments made on
Home by Sir William Crookes and attested by Sir William Huggins,
because the latter was only 'an amateur in a branch of research which
tasks the keenest powers of observation,' not of experiment; while, in
the chemical experiments of Sir William Crookes, 'the ability he
displayed was purely _technical_.' Neither gentleman could dream 'that
there are _moral_ sources of error.'[26]

[Footnote 25: Cf. _Making of Religion_, p. 362, 1898.]

[Footnote 26: _Quarterly Review_, 1871, pp. 342, 343.]

Alas, Dr. Carpenter, when he boldly published (in 1876) the thing that
was not, proved that a 'scientist' may be misled by 'moral sources of
error'!

In 1890, in _Proceedings of the S.P.R._, Sir William Crookes published
full contemporary accounts, noted by himself, of his experiments on
Home in 1871, with elaborate mechanical tests as to alteration of
weights; and recorded Home's feats in handling red-hot coals, and
communicating the power of doing so to others, and to a fine cambric
handkerchief on which a piece of red-hot charcoal lay some time.
Beyond a hole of half an inch in diameter, to which Home drew
attention, the cambric was unharmed. Sir William tested it: it had
undergone no chemical preparation.

Into the details of the mechanical tests as to alterations of weights
I cannot go. Mr. Angelo Lewis (Professor Hoffman), an expert in
conjuring, says that, accepting Sir William's veracity, and that he
was not hallucinated, the phenomena 'seem to me distinctly to be
outside the range of trick, and therefore to be good evidence, so far
as we can