Thus, the house of a certain M. Zoller, a lawyer and member of the Swiss Federal Council, a house at Stans, in Unterwalden, was made simply uninhabitable in 1860-1862.  The disturbances, including movements of objects, were of a truly odious description, and occurred in full daylight.  M. Zoller, deeply attached to his home, which had many interesting associations with the part his family played in the struggle against revolutionary France, was obliged to abandon the place.  He had made every conceivable sort of research, and had called in the local police and savants, to no purpose.

But the affair was explained away thus:  While the phenomena could still be concealed from public curiosity, a client called to see M. Zoller, who was out.  The client, therefore, remained in the drawing-room.  Loud and heavy blows resounded through the room.  The client, as it chanced, had once felt the effects of an electric battery, for some medical reason, apparently.  M. Zoller writes:  ’My eldest son was present at the time, and, when my client asked whether there was such a thing as an electrical machine in the house (the family having been enjoined to keep the disturbances as secret as possible), he allowed S. to think that there was.’  Consequently, the phenomena were set down to M. Zoller’s singular idea of making his house untenantable with an ’electric machine’—­which he did not possess.[14] A number of the most respected citizens, including the Superintendent of Police, and the chief magistrate for law, published a statement that neither Zoller, nor any of his family, nor any of themselves, produced or could have produced the phenomena witnessed by them in August 1862.  This declaration they put forth in the ’Schwytzer Zeitung,’ October 5, 1863.[15] No electric machine known to mortals could have produced the vast variety of alleged effects, none was ever found; and as M. Zoller changed his servants without escaping his tribulations, they can hardly be blamed for what, prima facie, it seems that they could not possibly do.  However, ‘electricity,’ like Mesopotamia, is ’a blessed word.’[16]

My own position in this matter of ‘physical phenomena’ is, I hope, clear.  They interest me, for my present purpose, as being, whatever their real nature and origin, things which would suggest to a savage his theory of Fetishism.  ’An inanimate object may be tenanted by a spirit, as is proved by its extraordinary movements.’  Thus the early thinker might reason, and go on to revere the object.  It is to be wished that competent observers would pay more attention to such savage practices as crystal-gazing and automatism as illustrated by the sticks of the Melanesians, Zulus, and Yaos.  Our scanty information we pick up out of stray allusions, but it has the advantage of being uncontaminated by theory, the European spectator not knowing the wide range of such practices and their value in experimental psychology.