Legend
The Dromedary and the Barb
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Astrology- Mrs.Guppy`s Flight
Sir,—Allow me to thank “Aldebaran”—always generously ready to advance the student—for his judgment on my question of sickness. He is right. The child died; but not for ten days after the date of the second figure. The time of death was 8.30 a.m. on the 22nd December. I do not quite understand how “Aldebaran” describes Jupiter—lord of the greater part of the House of Death—as combust with, the sun, seeing that, though both in the same house, they are nearly 22 deg. apart. This applies to the figure for the 8th December. Raphael also pronounced the second figure to be very menacing, but augured better of the first.
Adverting to the letter of Mr. Coleman, I will refer again to the evidence of the alleged transportation of Mrs. Guppy, as given in the number of your paper cited by Mr. Coleman, and, with your permission, will trouble you with some remarks upon it next week. I do not know what there is contradictory in my admissions and denials on this subject. I take as the standard of evidence for facts of this nature that which ought to satisfy anyone without previous experience of them, and with the strongest presumption, compatible with the reception of evidence at all, against them. It is not because this adverse presumption is weaker in my mind—owing, perhaps, to similar experiences— than it has formerly been, or than it is in most other minds, that I am entitled to describe evidence which raises a case of probability for me as proof positive and sufficient for all the world. It is also very necessary, in statements of fact, to avoid mixing up what is inferential. With all respect for Mr. Coleman, I think he has failed to observe this caution in stating as a fact that “the material living body of Mrs. Guppy was transported from one point to another in an instant of time.” The most that the evidence can possibly establish is her presence at one point at one moment, and at the other at the next. Unless the body was observed in transitu, it is mere inference that the material body was carried over the chimney pots and through the roofs of houses, and the ceilings of rooms. Four miles (is not that the distance?) in an instant of time would, by the operation of well-known mechanical laws, effect the disintegration which I imagined was ascribed to the operation of some unknown law at the commencement of the “journey.” Spiritualists always properly protest against their phenomena being regarded as miracles, or violations of the laws of nature, yet, if Mr. Coleman is right, such a miracle took place on this occasion—for, without one, not one shred of poor Mrs. Guppy would ever have reached Lamb’s Conduit-street. Even aerolites, which are more tightly compacted than the human body, are supposed to be disintegrated in their passage through space.
May I request you to correct a careless error in my German? In my paper on “Space and Time,” the sentence “Denken Sie das Wand” should of course read, “Denken Sie die Wand.”
Feb. 10th.
Editor's notes
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 286, February 15, 1878, p. 82