Note 403 — Chapter XII · MAGIC, ASTROLOGY, AND ALCHEMY.

I have been gratified by finding that this hope has been realized. I wish I could add that the phenomena were now explained. In No. 117 of the “Quarterly Review,” pp. 202 and 203, it has been suggested that the performances were effected by means of pictures and a concave mirror; and that the images of the former were reflected from the surface of the mirror, and received on a cloud of smoke under the eyes of the boy. This, however, I cannot admit; because such means could not have been employed without my perceiving them; nor would the images be reversed (unless the pictures were so) by being reflected from the surface of a mirror, and received upon a second surface; for the boy was looking down upon the palm of his hand, so that an image could not be formed upon the smoke (which was copious but not dense) between his eye and the supposed mirror. The grand difficulty of the case is the exhibition of “the correct appearance of private individuals unknown to fame,” as remarked in the “Quarterly Review,” in which a curious note, presenting “some new features of difficulty,” is appended. With the most remarkable of the facts there related I was acquainted; but I was not bold enough to insert them. I may now, however, here mention them. Two travellers (one of them, M. Léon Delaborde; the other, an Englishman), both instructed by the magician ’Abd-el-Kádir, are stated to have succeeded in performing similar feats. Who this Englishman was, I have not been able to learn: he positively denied all collusion, and asserted that he did nothing but repeat the forms taught him by the magician.