[Footnote 16: I follow _Incidents in My Life_, Series i. ii., 1864,
1872. _The Gift of Daniel Home_, by Madame Douglas Home and other
authorities.]

[Footnote 17: Home mentions this fact in a note, correcting an error
of Sir David Brewster's, _Incidents_, ii. 48, Note 1. The Earl of Home
about 1856 asked questions on the subject, and Home 'stated what my
connection with the family was.' Dunglas is the second title in the
family.]

In no instance, as far as I am informed, did anything extraordinary
occur in connection with Home which cannot be paralleled in the
accounts of Egyptian mediums in Iamblichus.[18]

[Footnote 18: The curious reader may consult my _Cock Lane and Common
Sense_, and _The Making of Religion_, for examples of savage,
mediæval, ancient Egyptian, and European cases.]

In 1850 America was interested in 'The Rochester Knockings,' and the
case of the Fox girls, a replica of the old Cock Lane case which
amused Dr. Johnson and Horace Walpole. The Fox girls became
professional mediums, and, long afterwards, confessed that they were
impostors. They were so false that their confession is of no value as
evidence, but certainly they were humbugs. The air was full of talk
about them, and other people like them, when Home, aged seventeen, was
so constantly attended by noises of rappings that his aunt threw a
chair at him, summoned three preachers, an Independent, a Baptist, and
a Wesleyan (Home was then a Wesleyan), and plunged into conflict with
the devil. The furniture now began to move about, untouched by man,