of ordinary witnesses in all climes, ages, and degrees of culture.  But these few scientific observers are scouted in this matter, by the vast majority of physicists and psychologists.  It is with this majority, if they choose to find time, and can muster inclination for the task of prolonged and patient experiment, that the ultimate decision as to the portee and significance of the facts must rest.  The problem cannot be solved and settled by amateurs, nor by ‘common-sense,’ that

Delivers brawling judgments all day long,
On all things, unashamed.

Ignorance, however respectable, and however contemptuous, is certainly no infallible oracle on any subject.  Meanwhile most representatives of physical science, perhaps all official representatives, hold aloof,—­not merely from such performances or pretences as can only be criticised by professional conjurers,—­but from the whole mass of reported abnormal events.  As the occurrences are admitted, even by believers, to depend on fluctuating and unascertained personal conditions, the reluctance of physicists to examine them is very natural and intelligible.

Whether the determination to taboo research into them, and to denounce their examination as of perilous moral consequence, is scientific, or is obscurantist, every one may decide for himself.  The quest for truth is usually supposed to be regardless of consequences, meanwhile, till science utters an opinion, till Roma locuta est, and does not, after a scrambling and hasty inquiry, or no inquiry at all, assert a prejudice; mere literary and historical students cannot be expected to pronounce a verdict.

Spiritualists, and even less convinced persons, have frequently denounced official men of science for not making more careful and prolonged investigations in this dusky region.  It is not enough, they say, to unmask one imposture, or to sit in the dark four or five times with a ‘medium’.  This affair demands the close scrutiny of years, and the most patient and persevering experiment.

This sounds very plausible, but the few official men of science, whose names the public has heard,—­and it is astonishing how famous among his peers a scientific character may be, while the public has never heard of him—­can very easily answer their accusers:  ‘What,’ they may cry, ’are we to investigate?  It is absurd to ask us to leave our special studies, and sit for many hours, through many years, probably in the dark, with an epileptic person, and a few hysterical believers.  We are not conjurers or judges of conjuring.’  Again, is a man like Professor Huxley, or Lord Kelvin, to run about the country, examining every cottage where there are rumours of curious noises, and where stones and other missiles are thrown about, by undetected hands?  That is the business of the police, and if the police are baffled, as in a Cock Lane affair at Port Glasgow, in 1864, and in Paris, in 1846, we cannot expect men of science to act as amateur detectives.