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M. de Gasparin, the husband of the well-known author of The Near and the Heavenly Horizons, was a table-turner, without being a spiritualist. His experiments were made in Switzerland, in 1853; he published a book on them, as we said; M. Figuier attacked it in Les Mysteres de la Science, after M. de Gasparin's death, and the widow of the author replied by republishing part of the original work.
M. Figuier is not a Darwinian: the derivation of our bodies from the bodies of apes is a conception too grossly materialistic for him. Our souls, however, he is quite willing to derive from the souls of lower animals. Obviously we have pre-existed; how are we to account for Mozart's precocity save by supposing his pre-existence? He brought with him the musical skill acquired in a previous life.
On the second day he was summoned back again, but his resentment of the dismissal rankled in him for a long time; injury to his pride was the wrong he found it hardest to forgive. His schoolmaster, aware of the unusual pursuits which he added to the routine of lessons, gave him as a prize the English translation of a book by Figuier The World before the Deluge. 'Deluge? growled Mr. Gunnery.
Near Cape Figuier, in the rocks where they had just landed from the sea with silk bundles, they had been pursued with gunshots, compelled to throw away their loads, losing everything, some fleeing to the mountain, others escaping by swimming among the breakers, in order to reach the French shore, in terror of the prisons of San Sebastian.
See Figuier, L'Annee Scientifique, 1862, pp. 353, 384. It should be observed that the venomous principle of poisonous mushrooms is not decomposed and rendered innocent by the process described in the note. It is merely extracted by the acidulated or saline water employed for soaking the plants, and care should be taken that this water be thrown away out of the reach of mischief.
Few of those who find pleasure in frequenting bookstores can have failed to come across one or more of the profusely illustrated volumes in which M. Louis Figuier has sought to render dry science entertaining to the multitude.
As Figuier says, "The difficulty is not to prove that there is a spiritual principle in us that resists death, for to question the existence of this principle we must doubt thought. The true problem is to ascertain if the spiritual and immortal principle within us is going to live again after death, in ourselves or somebody else.
Quite different will be the impression made upon those and they are yet too few who have learned that the method of science is the common-sense method of cautiously weighing evidence and withholding judgment where evidence is not forthcoming. If talking about remote and difficult subjects suffice to make one scientific, then is M. Figuier scientific to a quite terrible degree.
A thought had struck him which he did not like. He got up and put another log on the fire. Then he went over to the table and took up a book a volume of Figuier. He sat down and read a few pages, then threw down the book, and drawing writing materials toward him, wrote a half-dozen business letters.
But when I said, on the authority of Figuier, that an English man-of-war had once during an earthquake been thrown into the city of Callao and through the roof of a church, between the walls of which it remained standing upright on its keel, he got up and went too. He circulated the story in town with various embellishments.
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