HUMAN LEVITATION.


Why is it that living fish add nothing to the "weight of the bucket of
water in which they swim?" Charles II. is said to have asked the Royal
Society. A still more extraordinary question has been propounded in the
grave pages of the _Quarterly Journal of Science_, edited by Mr. Crookes,
a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the discoverer of the useful metal
thallium. The problem set in this learned review does not, like that of
the Merry Monarch, beg the question of facts. "What is the scientific
inference from the various accounts, modern and traditional, of human
levitation?" is the difficulty before the world at this present moment.
Now, there may be people who never heard of levitation, nor even of
"thaums," a term that frequently occurs in the article we refer to. A
slight acquaintance with the dead languages, whose shadows reappear in
this queer fashion, enables the inquirer to decide that "levitation"
means the power of becoming lighter than the surrounding atmosphere, and
setting at nought the laws of gravitation.

Thaums, again, are wonders, and there is no very obvious reason why they
should not be called wonders. But to return to levitation. Most of us
have heard how Mr. Home and other gifted people possess the faculty of
being raised from the ground, and of floating about the room, or even out
of the window. There are clouds of witnesses who have observed these
phenomena, which generally occur in the dark. In fact, they are part of
that vague subject called spiritualism, about which opinion is so much
divided, and views are so vague. It has been said that the human race,