the other beasts, doubtless our great ancestor had scarcely time to say "Mole!" ere the creature had disappeared out of this our phantasmal world into his lower and real one. When Adam said "pig!" that learned animal, undoubtedly, instead of gratefully receiving the appellation which should be his for all time, returned a conceited grunt, which, being interpreted, meant "gammon !"

The learned pig does not believe that, at his death, he shall be translated or metamorphosed into pork, bacon, spareribs, and sausages, which things, nevertheless, are undoubtedly true, but he ignores them; they don't and can't exist and realize themselves to him; and he is all the more serene for it. Wrapped in his comfortable carboniferous grease, and eschewing what is "too big to swallow, and too hard to bite," he passes his days in rest and quiet; and if there be a folly in man, it is to drag him out of his corpulent tranquillity. Once and once only did the devil get permission to torment the learned pig, and he did it by forcing upon his consciousness the presence of SPIRIT: and we all know the tragic result, he and all his learned brethren ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and were choked.

Why, then, I would tenderly ask Spiritualists, should they be so continually desiring to lead the learned pig into the same catastrophe? Why try to force the existence of spirit on his poor lardy brain, and pig-nut smelling snout, and get him choked in the vasty deep a second time? Good Spiritualist, let the learned pig follow his safe and unerring instinct; let him wallow voluptuously in the slough of theory, and feed amongst the troughs of materialistic faith, and don't drive any spirit into. him, which must by nature and all her laws--choke him. The learned pig, in his own sphere and character, is a respectable and useful, if not always a shining character. Once I saw him taken for a lion, when attempting to escape from a show, where he had been teaching clowns their letters-he raised a dreadful roar, and a whole fair fled before him. But the learned pig is usually no lion, therefore let him alone in his sty, and don't choke him with spirit; and don't persist in dragging moles into this upper and phantasmal world. Neither when an ostrich sticks his sapient head into a hole, that he may not be convinced of things that will force themselves disagreeably on his attention, trouble yourself to pull it out of it.

Yet this is what Spiritualists are continually attempting to do. They will neither let learned pigs, moles, bats, nor ostriches alone. They think it most natural that because they see spiritual entities, these creatures should see them too, and they fret and worry themselves to convince them of the truth. But this, though it is natural to the spiritualist, is most unnatural and agonizing to the learned pig, for the more spirit you pour

upon him, the more he must be choked-and to the mole, for the more you show him the light, the more you blind him.

There is a grand old axiom which has flourished ever since the Flood, which would save spiritualists a world of trouble if they would only act on it, namely,-"There are none so blind as those who won't see." Now, since the days of Hobbes, Tindal, and Hume, and all their continental herd of innoculated learned pigs, the Voltaires, Volneys, D'Alemberts, Diderots, and Rousseaus, their Strausses and Comptes, have made it unfashionable, ridiculous, and a mark of credulity, superstition, and imbecility, to believe in spirit and revelation. You might as well attempt to open an oyster with a spade, or shave yourself with a crosscut saw, as to persuade any of our genus Homo-SusEruditus, or our Homo-Talpæus that there are any such things as spirits, apparitions, spiritual revelations, or spiritual gifts and power. Compte is positive that there is no such thing. Hume is equally certain that no amount of evidence can prove the existence of a miracle, though he expects us to believe implicitly eight octavo volumes of assertions in his History of England, upon often very little evidence whatever. Michael Faraday tells us that we must not believe impossibilities; and, therefore, not a mole or a learned pig will believe their own eyes, much less yours, however much you may implore them to do so. You may never have been in the habit of mistaking posts for ghosts, or ghosts for posts; you may see tables go up to your ceilings, and rap out through the alphabet any amount of information and eloquence; you may see wonderful drawings and paintings by people who never drew or painted in their lives, may hear wonderful music by persons who never learned a note; may hear the most startling facts regarding yourselves or your connections, in this world or the next, answered by mediums who never knew you or yours, may see written the most wonderfully appropriate prescriptions by people without a particle of medical knowledge, and a thousand other things proving their own spiritual origin; but neither mole nor learned pig will ever see them to the end of time, for the simple reason that they are not in their natures. They have no faculties of that kind, any more than a clever dog has the faculties of a man. Suum cuique. You will never gather figs of thistles, nor grapes of thorns. "The natural man receiveth not the things of God, for they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."

When Michael Faraday told us that we must first settle what is impossible, and then refuse to believe these so-called impossibilities, even though they stare us in the face, and run bodily against us, that was on a Farrow-day, when learned pigs were coming into the world. That he said as a learned pig; but

as a Sandemonian preacher, he goes into the pulpit, opens his bible, and preaches from this text :-" With God ALL THINGS are possible!"

Now, we have lately been wading through a considerable amount of the learned-pig mire, amongst it Hibbert's "Philosophy of Apparitions;" Boismont's "Hallucinations," and Madden's "Phantasmata:" all of which undertake to convince us that all the spiritual demonstrations since the foundations of the worldfor their theory goes to that extent, if their pretensions don't, and wipes out the bible with all its phenomena of this kind as completely as possible;-are all illusions, delusions of the senses, phantoms, or diseases. Well, they have completely convinced me, that Hibbert's theory is a spectral illusion; that Boismont labours under a violent hallucination, and that Madden is a Mad’un, and his "Phantasmata," of all phantasms mater.

These are your pleasant fellows of the true mole and learned pig school, whom the more evidence you give them, the more they are blinded and choked. Pleasant fellows indeed, most beautifully illustrating the old axiom of "there are none so blind as those who won't see." Pleasant fellows, and right philosophical, who set out in the search for truth with a patch over one eye, and a magnifying lens stuck in the other; who, therefore, honestly assure you that they can't see what you try to shew them, but see all on the other side five times the size of life. With stomachs that are turned at the slightest scent of an unwelcome truth, but with a Jack-the-Giant-Killer's bag, instead of a stomach for all that favours their preconceptions. Hot pudding, cold bones and stones, and sticks and dirt all go into it, and make a show, if they never are digested. Pleasant fellows are all these, with their heads set on hind-before, looking backwards, but neither around nor forward; knocking their blind occiputs against a hundred facts, and yet never perceiving them. Of all these the most pleasant is Madden, who wades on through two large octavos, dealing with all ages and nations, beautifully unimpressible by what such poets as Bacon, Milton, Sir Thomas Browne, Locke, Luther, Melancthon, and the like simple souls believed in, and yet at the end finds himself pulled up hard by the convulsionaries of St. Medard, and confesses that his philosophy is at fault.

A few weeks ago an incidental mention having been made by me of a captain's ghost, the Times astonished the inmates of the War-Office, by calling it "The Ghost at the War-Office," and the newspapers all over the country have been busily discussing this apparition, of which no authentic account whatever has been published. How very rational! In consequence, I have received an invitation and a challenge. The invitation was from a German gentleman, who, dating from

Eastcheap, merely asked me a moderate and modest request -to put him in the way of seeing a ghost, or the devil himself, which he intimated would be equally acceptable. I could only reply that holding no commission to furnish ghosts to order, I was afraid I could not accommodate him, but as for the devil, he might see him any day without going out of Eastcheap. To prevent any undue disappointment in the novelty of the interview, should he succeed, I reminded him of his countryman Heine's experience:-that desiring to see the devil, and seeing him, he found him a pleasant gentlemanly fellow-but merely an old acquaintance.

Er frug: ob wir uns früher nicht

Schon einmal gesehen bei'm Span'schen Gesandten?
Und als ich recht besah sein Gesicht,

Fand ich in ihm einen alten Bekannten.

The challenge was from Charles Dickens, to point out any haunted house within the limits of the United Kingdom, where nobody can live, eat, drink, sit, stand, lie, or sleep without spiritual molestation; with the assurance that he had a champion who would, he believed, try the effect in his own person. Though myself preferring a comfortable bed these cold nights, and leaving the ghosts to come to me, if sociably inclined, and promising myself no particular pleasure or profit from the most brilliant success of this shivering pneumatomoxos in search of a ghost, but rather shivering myself at the idea of his lonely watchings in windy and dilapidated old mansions, 1 have disinterestedly pointed out a few such places, and probably my readers can point out more. Especially I have recommended the far-famed house at Willington, near Newcastle, in the following encouraging words:"The ghosts there who tormented Mr. Procter, a plain unimaginative Quaker, and his family for years, have been seen by numbers of people with whom I have conversed; people as wide awake as yourself or your champion. Though Mr. Procter has been compelled, for the sake of his children, to quit the house, the hauntings I hear, still go on. There your champion would certainly be successful, for one of the ghosts some years ago, was so obliging as to favour just such a valiant ghost-detector with an interview. Dr. Drury, of Sunderland, a valiant and selfconfident man, like your man, said if Mr. Procter would allow him to make the experiment, he would soon solve the mystery. Procter said he would be much obliged to him. Drury went there armed with pistols, and accompanied by a friend. They

first explored the whole house, cupboards, cellars, garrets, and all, to make sure of no contrivances being played off upon them, though they confessed that Mr. Procter's character was a sufficient guarantee against any imposition. They took their stations, one in a chamber much frequented by the ghosts, and one on the landing to watch all movement on the stairs; with candles burning. About midnight, the well-known female figure issued from the closet near Drury, walked or glided slowly past him, and approached his friend on the landing. At that interesting moment when the champion should have collared or shot the ghost, he gave a most frightful yell, and fell on the floor in a swoon. Mr. Procter had to rush from his bed to his assistance, but he went out of one fit into another till three o'clock in the morning, and they began to think it was all up with him. He got through it, but was laid up for many weeks with the effects, and on his recovery published the account himself, which I have." Well, that is just the place for your man, who I hope will prove more staunch than Drury.

To the programme of operating laws, I appended a few remarks, which I also recommend to others who may form any too fond hopes as ghost-hunters :-"But suppose your Goliath does all, or any part of this, cui bono? If he sees nothing, his nothing can't set aside everything that thousands of people, just as sharp and sane, have seen. If he does see a ghost, that may satisfy himself, but would not convince you; for if good, substantial, unexceptionable evidence of apparitions be all that is wanted, that exists already and in superabundance. Your man's additional evidence would not amount to an infinitesimal fraction in addition to the vast mass already in existence, and would not be sensibly perceived by the world at large. Such phenomena as these, like all other matters in question, will not be decided by any individual case, but by the general accumulation of substantial evidence. Such evidence exists to any amount, accumulated through all ages, up to the present hour, and by men of all classes, and of the most clear and practical intellects:-Judges, statesmen, philosophers, lawyers, logicians, theologians, the brawny-minded thinker amongst the rest. By all kinds of people.

Now, if all this does not convince the world, is any experience of your friend's likely to do it? Not a bit of it. If even the miracles of our Saviour did not convince the knowing fellows of His day, is anything less brilliant likely to convince the clever fellows of our time? Are there half a dozen literary or scientific men in London, now, who had they lived in Christ's time, would have believed on Him? Certainly not! Had they been told there was an old carpenter at Bethlehem whose wife had a son supposed to be illegitimate, and that the old man gave