Genre:

News-Commentary, Drollery

Subjects:

Spiritualism, Religious Authority, Supernaturalism, Miracle, Experiment, Proof

    Discusses news that Daniel D Home has been asked to leave Rome unless he discontinues his 'business in the spirit line'. Notes that during Home's interrogation by police officers in Rome, spirits apparently rapped on a nearby table, but Punch requests that such a 'phenomenon' be 'submitted to the inspection of a British Inspector or two', emphasising that in Rome 'the motion of inanimate objects', such as pictures and statues, is 'so ordinary an occurrence'. Notes that the papacy apparently attributes table-moving to an inferior class of spirits, but suggests that Pope Pius IX 'might order an experimentum crucis for the extraction of truth'.