WCP2546

[1]¹

8th Feb. 1867

My dear Wallace

I promised to read the tract² which you were kind enough to send me, and to give you my frank opinion upon it.

I read it with disappointment. I opened it with the idea that it contained a record of your new experiments & observations. There are ^is no [1 illeg. word crossed out] nothing of the kind from the beginning of the book to the end.

I was acquainted with ^{most if not} all that you adduce; and in many cases more fully & closely acquainted [2] with it than you appear to be. I know Rechenbach³ [sic], and in 1856 paid an oficial [sic] visit to his house near Vienna.⁴ I saw him in the midst of his apparatus — his magnets & his crystals — and he described to me his methods and results. I did not want to hear Riechenbach [sic] but you.

I also was ^am the person who addressed Thackeray⁵ on the occasion referred to by Weld.⁶ The report that you give of the affair does not rightly represent it. Poor Thackeray was staggered and abashed by the [3] ownership of my remonstrance regarding the lending the authority of his name to that paper "Stranger than fiction"⁷ — (my great respect for Thackeray rendered my remonstrance earnest) In about a year afterward he poured scorn upon the whole affair ^{Spirit rapping} in the Round About papers of the Cornhill magazine.⁸

You speak of phenomena "such as no human being could possibly have produced". I have heard this statement only too often. I have sat myself at Spiritual Seances, and produced motions myself, which [4] grave to some extent and quasi-scienctific men immediately adjacent to me prounounced impossible to make[?]. I have heard men talk in excited astonishment on ^about the ardently supernatural character of vibrations which I was producing myself. And had they described their impressions to you you would in all probability have agreed with them. The "facts" of such people are not facts but feelings.

I see the usual keen powers of your mind displayed in the treatment of this question. But mental power may show itself whether its materials be facts or fictions. It is not lack of logic that I see in your book, but a willingness that I deplore to [2 illeg. words crossed out] ^accept data which are unworthy of your attention. This is frank — is it not.

Yours very faithfully | John Tyndall⁹ [signature]