invesidgate the case. The committee reported that it was a genuine case of spirit-control, and in 1849 the clergy moved. Mary Jane was brought before a magistrate, and was sentenced to sixty days in prison; which effectively persuaded the spirits to leave her.
The dates sufficiently show that this was quite independent of the Hydesville phenomena, and the case of Andrew Jackson Davis is similarly earlier and independent. Davis, whose real trade was shoe-making, became in 1843 a mesmeric healer and clairvoyant. He was then a precocious, uncanny, long-haired youth of seventeen: the kind of person who was easily believed to be rich in animal magnetism. In 1844 he declared that Swedenborg and Galen had appeared to him in a trance, and warned him that he had a great mission to mankind. This is, of course, a genuine case of Spiritualism, since he professed to be a medium communicating with the spirits of the dead; but it is very doubtful if Davis could have initiated such a movement as the Fox family eventually did.
The extraordinary effusions he now poured out convinced many that he was really spirit-controlled, and two admirers, Dr. Lyon and the Rev. W. Fishbough, took him to New York to inaugurate the new revelation. The three of them lived for a year on Davis's mesmeric healing, and in the intervals he went into a trance and reeled off, in a most remarkable fashion, a new philosophy of the universe. It was taken down as he spoke, and appeared under the
