The Humbugs of the World, P. T. Barnum [suggested reading .txt] 📗

I should have recommended to hire a healthy female steam-engine for a wet nurse to this young motive force; say a locomotive, for instance. I feel sure the thing would have lived if it could have had a gauge-faucet or something of that sort to draw on. But the medical folks in charge chose to permit the mother to nurse the child, and she not being able to supply proper nutriment, the poor little innocent faded⁠—if that word be appropriate for what couldn’t be seen⁠—and finally “gin eout;” and the machinery, after some abortive joggles and turns, stood hopelessly still.

This story is true⁠—that is, it is true that the story was told, the pretences were gone through, and the birth was actually believed by a good many people. Some of them were prodigiously enthusiastic about it, and called the invisible brat the New Motive Power, the Physical Savior, Heaven’s Last Best Gift to Man, the New Creation, the Great Spiritual Revelation of the Age, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Act of all Acts, and so on, and so forth.

The great question of all was, Who was the daddy? I don’t know of anybody’s asking this question, but its importance is extreme and obvious. For if things like this are going to happen, the ladies will be afraid to sleep alone in the house if so much as a sewing-machine or apple-corer be about, and will not dare take solitary walks along any stream where there is a water power.

A couple of miscellaneous anecdotes may not inappropriately be appended to this story of monstrous delusion.

Once a “writing medium” was producing sentences in various foreign languages. One of these was Arabic. An enthusiastic youth, a half-believer, after inspecting the wondrous scroll, handed it to his seat-mate, a professor (as it happened) in one of our oldest colleges, and a man of real learning. The professor scrutinized the document. What was the youth’s delight to hear him at last observe gravely, “It is a kind of Arabic, sure enough!”

“What kind?” asked the young man with intense interest.

“Gum-arabic,” said the professor.

The spirit of the prophet Daniel came one night into the apartment of a medium named Fowler, and right before his eyes, he said, wrote down some marks on a piece of paper. These were shown to the Reverend George Bush, Professor of Hebrew in the New-York University, who said that they were “a few verses from the last chapter of Daniel” and were learnedly written. Bush was a spiritualist as well as a professor of Hebrew, and he ought to have known better than to endorse spirit-Hebrew; for shortly there came others, who, to use a rustic phrase, “took the rag off the Bush.” These inconvenient personages were three or four persons of learning: one a Jew, who proved that the document was an attempt to copy the verses in question, by someone so ignorant of Hebrew as not to know that it is written backward, that is, from right to left.

During the last few months, a “boy medium,” by the name of Henry B. Allen, thirteen years of age, has been astonishing people in various parts of the country by “Physical Manifestations in the Light.” The exhibitions of this precocious youngster have been “managed” by a Dr. Randall, who also lectures upon Spiritualism, expounding its “beautiful philosophy.” For a number of weeks this couple held forth in Boston, sometimes giving several séances during the day, not more than thirty being allowed to attend at one time, each of whom were required to pay an admission fee of one dollar.

The Banner of Light fully endorsed this Allen boy, and gave lengthy accounts of his manifestations. The arrangements for his exhibition were very simple. A dulcimer, guitar, bell, and small drum being placed on a sofa or several chairs set against the wall, a clotheshorse was set in front of them and covered with a blanket, which came to the floor. To obtain “manifestations,” a person was required to take off his coat and sit with his back to the clotheshorse. The medium then took a seat close to, and facing the investigator’s left side, and grasped the left arm of the latter on the under side, above the elbow, with his (the medium’s) right hand and near the wrist with the other hand. The “manager” then covered with a coat, the arms and left shoulder of the medium including the left arm of the investigator. The medium soon commenced to wriggle and twist⁠—the “manager” said he was always nervous under “influence”⁠—and worked the coat away from the position in which it had been placed. Taking his right hand from the investigator’s arm, he readjusted the coat, and availed himself of that opportunity to get the investigator’s wrist between his (the medium’s) left arm and knee. That brought his left hand in such a position that with it he could grasp the investigator’s arm where he had previously grasped it with his right hand. With the latter he could then reach around the edge of the clotheshorse and make a noise on the instruments. With the drumsticks he thumped on the dulcimer. Taking the guitar by the neck, he could vibrate the strings and show the body of the instrument above the clotheshorse, without anyone seeing his hand! All persons present were so seated that they could not see behind the clotheshorse, or have a view of the medium’s right shoulder. When asked why people were not allowed to occupy such a position, that they could have a fair view of the instruments when sounded, the “manager” replied that he did not exactly know, but presumed it was because the magnetic emanations from the eyes of the beholders would prevent the spirits being able to move the instruments at all! What was claimed to be a spirit-hand was often shown above the clotheshorse, where it flickered for an instant and was withdrawn; but it was invariably a right hand with the wrist toward the