At Portsmouth, in New England, in June, 1682, in the house of George Walton, beyond the most terrific flying about of stones and the appearance of a black cat, some of the family reported that they saw once the apperance of a hand put forth at the hall window, throwing stones towards the entry, though there was nobody in the hall the while.

But one more favoured still was thirty years later the object of similar demoniacal effects, as he held them to be.

In Southey's Life of Wesley, an account is given of rappings of a very similar character, at Wesley's father's house, at Epworth, in Lincolnshire, in 1716. In the notes and illustrations appended to the biography, Southey has printed a series of letters, narrating these incidents, by Mrs. Wesley to her son Samuel, the elder brother of John, also one or two by his sister Susannah, and a statement from the Journal of Samuel Wesley, the father, "of noises and disturbances in my house at Epworth, Lincolnshire, in December and January, 17 16." There is also a narrative, drawn by John Wesley himself, and published in the Arminian Magazine.

The facts narrated in these several documents, entirely support each other, and refer to loud and frequent knockings, on and about the beds and on the walls; to sounds like the steps of a man going up and down the stairs at all hours of the night; sounds like that of dancing; clashings among the bottles, and another sound distinct from it "as if a peck of money had been thrown down before us." Again, the latches of the doors were opened by unseen agency, and Wesley (the father) was "thrice pushed by an invisible power, once against my desk in the study," &c. It is also stated that at night, at family prayers, the knockings at the prayer for King George and the Prince always recurred; that when the prayers for the king and prince were omitted, there was no knocking.

Southey's Life of Wesley is so familiar a book, that any of our readers interested in the matter, may easily refer to the letters and documents in question. Southey's remark, after narrating in four pages the principal facts, it is due to him to quote. "An author," he says, "who in this age relates such a story, and treats it as not utterly incredible and absurd, must expect to be ridiculed; but the testimony upon which it rests is far too strong to be set aside because of the strangeness of the relation such things may be preternatural, and yet not miraculous: they may be not in the ordinary course of nature, and yet imply no alteration of its laws. And with regard to the good end, which they may be supposed to answer, it would be end sufficient if sometimes one of those un

happy persons, who looking through the dim glass of infidclity, see nothing beyond this life and the narrow sphere of mortal existence, should from the well-established truth of one such story (trifling and objectless as it might otherwise appear) be led to a conclusion that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.

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A greater than Southey, who loved oft to read his story of the life of this earnest servant of Christ, comes nearer the truth than Southey did in his analysis of this fancy. In Coleridge's copy of this work, which he left to Southey, we find the following note: "All these stories, and I could produce fifty at least, equally well authenticated, and as far as the veracity of the narrators, and the single fact of their having seen and heard such and such sights or sounds, above all rational scepticism are as much like one another, as the symptoms of the same disease in different patients. And this indeed, I take to be the true and only solution, a contagious nervous disease, the acme or intensest form of which is catalepsy. S. T. C." And again in a note on one of Mrs. Wesley's letters, Coleridge says in support of this view: "First the new maid-servant hears it, then the new man. They tell it to the children who now hear it; the children tell the mother, who now begins to hear it; she the father, and the night after he awakes, and then first hears it. Strong presumption, first, that it was not objective, i e., a trick; secondly, that it was a contagious disease to the auditual nerves, what vapours or blue devils are to the eye. Observe, too, each of these persons hears the same noise as a different sound. What can be more decisive in proof of its subjective nature? S. T. C."

These notes of Coleridge appear to us to settle the Wesley raps and sounds quite effectually, despite of Southey's apparent belief in their reality.

We had intended to have completed this article by comparing this mental epidemic of spiritualism with some of the allied mental disorders which history records as having afflicted the human race. Our limits, already exceeded, oblige us to defer this to a future number. We would only add to our present observations, a sentence from the remarks with which the writer in the Westminster brings his sketch of spiritualism to a conclusion, where he says, "This movement presents to the psychologist or student of mental philosophy, a most remarkable assemblage of facts illustrative of the power of fraud, hallucination, deception, and self-deception; furnishing him with another instance of

those epidemic maladies of opinion which merit more scientific treatment than they have yet received; which, though generally religious, are not necessarily so, as we have seen in a large scale in the Mississippi scheme, the South Sea bubble, and the railway mania that swept through society like cholera. or the plague, and frequently on a smaller scale in politics, in which opinions without foundation, and excitement without cause, have suddenly sprung up, and run their brief course fainter and unrecognised, but equally unquestionable indications of mental disease."

C. LOCKHART ROBERTSON.

The Land of Silence and the Land of Darkness. By the Rev. B. G. JOHNS, Chaplain of the Blind School, St. George's Fields. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1857.

The work before us is a reprint of a series of articles on the education of the deaf and dumb and the blind, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review from the pen of Mr. Johns. They are written in a pleasing manner, and, with their somewhat ad captandum title, are likely to attract the attention of those who may not hitherto have thought much upon the matter. Mr. Johns is chaplain to the school for the blind in St. George's Fields, and doubtless his experience as such has given him opportunities of observing and comprehending their true condition, and the best means for ameliorating it; but we are at a loss to see that the same follows in the case of the deaf and dumb, since the modes of educating the blind and the deaf have little in common.

With regard to the deaf and dumb, the author states that he was first led to the publication of these remarks after careful thought, by the scanty evidence to be derived from books. Since then, however, circumstances have introduced him to the society of an educated deaf mute, and the result has been to corroborate so strongly his views on deaf mute education, as to lead him to make them more fully known. The difference of his views from those of English teachers of the deaf and dumb generally, is that he wishes to rely almost altogether on lip reading and articulation, and to discard

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signs or pantomimic language from the school-room. Johns does not appear to be aware that the subject of articulation for the deaf and dumb has been a vexatio questio amongst teachers since the earliest records of deaf mute instruction. That it has had its advocates and its opponents, and that there is little or nothing he has advanced which has not already been heard and replied to. The expression, however, "Scanty evidence to be derived from books," shows us that the author has not made himself acquainted with all that evidence, however scanty it may be; and the absence of some of the more recent and more important works of deaf mute literature from his enumeration of such works, shows us that these were most probably unknown to him.

The two great early promoters of deaf mute instruction, were De l'Epee of Paris, and Heinicke of Leipzig. Though earlier writers as well as teachers had laboured for the deaf and dumb, the true history of deaf mute instruction as a general movement commences with these two benevolent men. Now Heinicke's views may be gathered from the following, which in substance is his own language. "The written word is only the representative of articulate sound; it addresses itself to the eye, and can never be imprinted on the soul, or become the medium of thought. That is the sole prerogative of the voice. Without an acquaintance with spoken language, a deaf mute child can never be anything more than a writing machine, or have anything beyond a succession of images passing through his mind.' This being the theory of the German master, he necessarily laboured to make articulation with the deaf mute the great object of his instruction, and since his time the German teachers have been his closest followers.

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The Abbe de l'Epee, on the contrary, assumed that our ideas had no closer connection, naturally, with vocal sounds than with written words, and that the signs or gestures natural to the deaf and dumb may be made to answer the same purpose, which our native tongue serves in learning a foreign language; he aimed, therefore, to give his pupils an acquaintance, with language under its visible forms, by the means of gesture or pantomimic language, without the intervention of speech; directly opposing Heinicke in his theory, that speech or vocal sound was necessary to give ideas or real instruction.

Heinicke published a work in 1780, where he not only advocated his own system, but also declared all other methods to be useless and pernicious, and no less than "folly, fraud, and nonsense." De l'Epee entered the arena of contest, and a VOL. IV. NO. 25.

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somewhat sharp correspondence followed; the substance of which may be thus stated. The German maintained that the deaf and dumb, instead of being instructed in language through the medium of signs and writing, should be taught speaking and reading aloud, by imitating the motion of the lips. From this Mr. Johns will see that his view is no newly mooted point, but one really as old as the art itself. De l'Epee replied to Heinicke that he had himself instructed the deaf and dumb in speaking, and according to his experience, that the acquisition was of no great value. That the mechanical learning of speech was to them so much deducted from mental cultivation. That if it was impossible for the deaf and dumb to remember, by the sense of sight, the order in which the letters of words were placed in writing, the same difficulty appertains to speaking aloud, since they must remember the different positions of the mouth demanded by the different sounds, that neither the sounds of letters nor dactylology were capable of conveying the signification of words, for which, recourse must be had to signs.

Which had the best of the contest, where both were more or less wrong, it is not worth while to examine; but it is worth while to notice, that since that time, unfortunately a division to some extent has existed amongst teachers, which has had the effect sometimes of making the partizans of each, run their theories to such extremes as to become dangerous to the cause itself. This may be more particularly said of those, who have been the great advocates of articulation,—the teachers of the German schools. Members of Heinicke's family, filled the institutions of Crefeld, Berlin, and Leipzig, and teachers formed under them have spread over Germany, and carried with them all his predilections for articulation. Sicard succeeded De l'Epee and modified his method, and those who have followed him have done the same, so those points which appeared weakest in his arguments with Heinicke, have now been given up or modified. De l'Epee laid great stress upon the manual alphabet. It now occupies, as an instrument of instruction, a very subordinate position. More and more as the improvement in teaching progresses, the greater dependence is placed upon written language, explained in the elementary stages by the means of those gestures, which are found to be natural to all who have not otherwise a common language, and as instruction progresses, by the means of that language already learned.

The aids used in teaching the deaf and dumb may be said to consist of: