Blavatsky H.P. - (New) York Against Lankester: Difference between revisions

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Everyone knows that Dr. Slade is not acquainted with foreign languages, and yet at our first séance, three years ago, on the day after my arrival in New York, where no one knew me, I received upon his slate a long communication in Russian. <ref>[The actual date of H.P.B.’s arrival in New York, namely, July 7, 1873, is given in A. P. Sinnett’s Incidents in the Life of H. P. Blavatsky, p. 175. It is also implied by H.P.B. herself in a letter to her aunt, Nadyezhda A. de Fadeyev (The Path, New York, Vol. IX, February, 1895, p. 385), written the day she became a citizen of the United States, July 8, 1878, “five years and one day since I came to America,” as she says therein.—Compiler.]</ref> I had purposely avoided giving either to Dr. Slade, or his partner, Mr. Simmons, any clue to my nationality, and while, from my accent, they would of course have detected that I was not an American they could not possibly have known from what country I came. I fancy that if Dr. Lankester had allowed Slade to write on both knees and both elbows successively or simultaneously, the poor man would not have been able to turn out a Russian message by trick and device.

In reading the accounts in the London papers it has struck me as very remarkable that this “vagrant” medium, after baffling such a host of savants, should have fallen so easy a victim to the zoologico-osteological brace of scientific detectives. Fraud, that neither the “psychic” Serjeant Cox; nor the “unconsciously cerebrating” Carpenter; nor the wise Wallace; nor the experienced M. A. (Oxon.); nor the cautious Lord Rayleigh, who, mistrusting his own acuteness, employed a professional juggler to attend the séance with him; nor Professor Carter-Blake; nor a host of other competent observers could detect, was seen by the eagle eyes of the Lankester-Donkin gemini at a single glance. There has been nothing like it since Beard of electro-hay-fever and Eddy fame, denounced the faculty of Yale for a set of asses, because they would not accept his divinely inspired revelation of the secret of mind-reading, and pitied the imbecility {{Page aside|225}} of that “amiable idiot,” Colonel Olcott, for trusting his own two-months’ observation of the Eddy phenomena in preference to the electric doctor’s single séance of an hour.

I am an American citizen in embryo, Mr. Editor, and I cannot hope that the English magistrates of Bow Street will listen to a voice that comes from a city proverbially held in small esteem by British scientists. When Professor Tyndall asks Professor Youmans if the New York carpenters could make him a screen ten feet long for his Cooper Institute lectures, and whether it would be necessary to send to Boston for a cake of ice that he wished to use in the experiments; and when Huxley evinces grateful surprise that a “foreigner could express himself in your [our] language, in such a way as to be so readily intelligible, to all appearance,” by a New York audience, and that those clever chaps—the New York reporters—could report him despite his accent, neither New York witnesses nor New York “spooks” can hope for a standing in a London court, when the defendant is prosecuted by English scientists. But fortunately for Dr. Slade, British tribunals are not inspired by the Jesuits, and so Slade may escape the fate of Leymarie. He certainly will, if he is allowed to summon to the witness stand his Owasso and other devoted “controls,” to write their testimony inside a double slate, furnished and held by the magistrate himself. This is Dr. Slade’s golden hour: he will never have so good a chance to demonstrate the reality of phenomenal manifestations and make Spiritualism triumph over skepticism; and we who know the doctor’s wonderful powers, are confident that he can do it, if he is assisted by those who in the past have accomplished so much through his instrumentality. <ref> [Consult the Bio-Bibliographical Index of the present volume for other data concerning Dr. Slade.—Compiler.]</ref>