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Linden

Wellington Som[erset].

Nov[ember] 26. [18]66

My dear M^r Wallace,

You dropped no hint of your belief in Spiritualism when I was at your house, or I should have been glad to talk the matter over with you. I was much set against the spiritualists years ago by going to a great display at the Hanover Square Rooms, and making acquaintance with some people who proved to be paid "subjects", and whose appearance and way was not prepossessing at least as far as scientific credibility went. So far as I know [2] anything of your list of believers in spiritualism I cannot say I like them as observers in a field of enquiry particularly haunted by professional impostors. But I believe you really know how to observe and describe, why do you not make a series of direct investigation yourself with all precautions against imagination and fraud. Your results would I believe be thought more of, whatever results they might lead you to, than all the spiritualist literature extant, but when you reason at second-hand on the facts related by [3] Home² and so on, I confess I do not attach at all the same weight to your argument. A very intimate friend of Lord Lyndhurst's³, who was present when Home exhibited there, once gave me an account of Lord Lyndhurst's communication with the spiritualists, and I will write for it in writing, and send it to you.

Your book strongly confirms me in the opinion I have expressed of the notions of the spiritualists being mostly familiar to the lower races now and in ancient times. We [4] may not agree as to the cause of these notions and the basis of fact they may have, but when you see my facts compared with spiritualistic books you will have to admit the great extent to which these books reproduce the known opinions of half-civilised and savage races.

As you think so well of the spirit doctrine from the evidence of others, I hope very much that you will make a careful set of observations of your own.

Believe me | Very truly yours | E. B. Tylor [signature]

A R Wallace Esq⁴