which he "made his pile," and the manner in which he was received in England when he joined his family there, are excellent bits of satiric comedy.
"Wallingford" (J. B. Lippincott Company) is another book which aims at securing the factitious interest of local color and personality. Wallingford is a suburb of Philadelphia, the author is understood to be an official of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, various railroad magnates are introduced under their real names, and accurate pictures of Philadelphia and New York streets form a romantic background. The book is not without interest, but it has that air of being written by a clever young man which is somehow (perhaps unreasonably) exasperating to the maturer mind. However, the author will improve. He will not always be young. Let us trust that he will always retain his cleverness.
"Until you understand a writer's ignorance," says Coleridge, "presume yourself ignorant of his understanding." This excellent saying is called to the Reviewer's mind by John Darby's "Nineteenth Century Sense: the Paradox of Spiritualism" (J. B. Lippincott Company). There are portions which he is not sure that he has comprehended, but he is willing to own that the muddle may be in his own mind, especially as the larger portion which he finds intelligible is a sufficiently vigorous revivification of mediæval metaphysics in terms of the nineteenth century. But a Reviewer who has grown to doubt all metaphysics, who is willing, in John Darby's terminology, to grant comprehension but not apprehension to the human mind, who looks on all ontological speculations as "words thrown at" the unknowable with only the result of further obscuring it, to such a Reviewer it can make little difference whether he understands the author's ignorance or is ignorant of his understanding.
The Seybert commission, which, according to the terms of the will of Henry Seybert, was appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to investigate modern Spiritualism, has just made its "Preliminary Report" (J. B. Lippincott Company). The commission is composed of Dr. William Pepper, Dr. Joseph Leidy, Dr. George A. Koenig, Prof. Robert Ellis Thompson, Prof. George S. Fullerton, Dr. Horace Howard Furness, Mr. Coleman Sellers, Dr. James W. White, Dr. Calvin B. Knerr, and Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. It had sittings with a number of well-known mediums, whose names are given in the report, and it examined into the questions of independent slate-writing, spirit-rapping, materializations, and other special lines of mediumship. The committee went to work in an impartial and scientific spirit, and they unanimously deny the honesty of the mediums or the genuineness of the manifestations. They hold themselves open to conviction, however, and express a willingness to continue their researches in the hope of meeting with some variation in the monotony of imposture. Aside from their scientific value, the papers are amusing and entertaining reading.
