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586 his pap and his bottle, and dribbling effusively as indication of teething, when about a fortnight before the end of May, as the cook-maid sat at night in the kitchen, she saw the headless form of a child enter the door from the court, walk or glide through the kitchen into the pantry, and suddenly vanish.

On 1 June, seven weeks before Fontelautus had completed his second year, rising to meet his father who had been absent from home for some months, the boy got his foot entangled in a bedside carpet, and falling on his right arm bent the bone, or, as Jonas words it, "the pressure of the superincumbent weight gave it an unprecedented degree of incurvation." Before he had recovered from this he had a fall on his head, and soon water on the brain began to gather, and he had convulsions during ten days, and from the appearance of his eyes it was clear that the child could no longer see. The father was convinced that this was a case of obsession by an evil spirit, not of possession, as he is careful to explain, and he had recourse to exorcism, which temporarily relieved the distressed infant. The contortions, the expression of the face, the foaming of the mouth, all satisfied the father that the child was beset by evil spirits, and his exorcisms were always conducive to relief of the patient; an expression of repose and relief stole over the distressed countenance of the child; and when he died it was during such a pause of relief; as the Prebendary says, "His soul was not extracted from the body by the coercive agency of an infernal envoy."

So far we do not see how that Fontelautus should be such a crushing argument against materialism. Yet the Memoirs were addressed to "Mr. William Lawrence, surgeon, as chief British apostle of the system of Natural Philosophy completely reducing man to a