Genre:

News-Commentary, Drollery

Subjects:

Mental Illness, Meteorology, Superstition, Natural Law, Supernaturalism, Spiritualism, Belief, Photography, Lecturing

    Responds to news of a man who ejected a needle from his body (without having known how it got there). Expects to hear news of somebody who 'had been throwing crooked pins off his stomach without being aware of ever having bolted them', and suggests that the man may have taken the needle inside him during a fit of 'temporary insanity'. Focusing on the story of a shower of toads, suggests that it might rain cats and dogs too, and that the toads 'are real wonders that cannot be satisfactorily accounted for on natural principles like photographs and electrotypes and electric telegrams'. Adds that such stories are 'calculated to nourish a pleasing thought that the supernatural is not all humbug' and to 'encourage the expectation that we shall one day have a genuine ghost appearing regularly in public at certain times, and perhaps delivering lectures on spiritualism at a scientific institution'. Concludes by noting that this would 'dumfound the intelligence of the nineteenth century', although it 'may have much the same reason for disbelieving in ghosts as the intelligence of other centuries had for believing in them'.