taken into account by the writers of
history, and scientific workers must not sneer at them.

X. DEVILTRY.

Scientific men in their investigations need not expect to come into
contact with miracles; but they may and do find in the border-land of
science facts which reveal the agency of intellectual beings distinct
from men, and too vulgar in their manifestation to be confounded with
God or His blessed angels. Such agents in the book of the Scriptures are
called devils, and intercourse with them is styled superstition, seeking
their assistance is magic or witchcraft, and consulting them is
divination or fortune-telling. All these practices are directly and
strictly forbidden in the Scriptures, and yet they are commonly enough
in use in our own day to procure effects that gratify the curiosity of
such, especially, as have no settled belief in supernatural religion.

Some of these effects are connected with bodily cures and thus are of
interest to physicians. For instance, spiritualistic mediums, whether
connecting their practices with magnetism or not, though entirely
ignorant of medicine, are at times able to state the exact bodily
indisposition of sick persons living at a great distance, put into
communication with them by holding some object belonging to them. They
will indicate the seat of the disorder, its nature and progress, its
complications. They propose simple and efficacious remedies, using not
infrequently technical terms which are certainly unknown to them before.
They manifest the thoughts of others, reveal family secrets, answer
questions put in languages of which they know nothing. To deny facts
attested by thousands of witnesses of various nations belonging to
various religious denominations or professing no religion whatever, is
not the spirit of science. It it estimated that 100,000 spiritist books
and pamphlets are sold yearly in the United States alone. It is certain
that much, very much imposture is mixed up with many undeniable facts,
but that does not dispose of the real facts mixed up with the
impostures. Tyndall once caught an ill-starred spiritualistic impostor
at his juggling. He concluded that all other spiritists were impostors.
The world now laughs at him for his foolish reasoning.

Of course, I do not suppose that spiritism is mainly employed in such
matters as would directly interest the physician. It has grown into a
system of religion and morals, very peculiar and at variance with t