Page:Poet Lore, volume 4, 1892.djvu/456

 filled with one or another gas, must rise, only a few feet from me my friend was repeating for the thousandth time a trifling experiment,—how, at a moment’s notice, to throw a given card out of a pack.

Oftentimes he would experiment in my absence, and then surprise me with many a clever piece of work. His labors were never superficial, and he despised common jugglery. His secret lay in aptly combining various mechanical, chemical, and physical effects; statics and dynamics, optics, with its branches, acoustics, magnetism, electricity, synthetical and analytical chemistry, all these and in part other sciences also, as astronomy, anatomy, physiology, were mastered by my friend with an unusual earnestness, in the course of seven or eight years,—but all with a view to escamotage.

It is no wonder, then, that my friend bought every book or pamphlet, no matter how trifling, which dealt with escamotage or kindred matters, as magic, alchemy, astrology, magnetism, and somnambulism, mystics, chiromancy, and the like. His library, which, like his instruments, he kept in my room, was an odd collection. Beside books of actual value, works of famous savants like Newton, Linné, Locke, Leibnitz, Bacon, Arago, Wolf, Lavoisier, Cartesius, Brown, Mohs, Cuvier, Humboldt, etc., you might see books of unknown or forgotten pseudo-scientists and charlatans; e. g., ‘Ten Books on the Secrets of Nature,’ by Paracelsus Bombastus, published in Strasburg in 1570; or Mehnu’s ‘Mirror of Alchemy;’ Böckmann’s ‘Archives of Magnetism and Somnambulism,’ Cagliostro’s ‘Adventures;’ Commiers’s ‘Les Oracles des Sibylles,’ published about a hundred years ago; Crusius’s work on Schroepfer’s art of summoning spirits, Wincer’s ‘Demonology,’ and many other like works. But the clear mind of my friend was elevated above that enormous mass of men’s errors. He studied those strange books rather from curiosity than for use, although he was well aware that knowledge of such mental aberrations might assist him in strengthening natural delusions.

His work was not only thorough, but also independent. He not only learned known experiments, but invented new ones, and through systematical efforts, endeavored to place his pseudo-science upon a broad and secure basis. No wonder, then, that later his