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 SPIRAL VESSELS SPIRITUALISM 275 several times larger than the others, and for- merly called 8. grandiflora, is now placed in a separate genus, exochorda. Among the her- baceous species, the finest native is the queen of the prairie (8. lobatab), found wild from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, and common in cul- Dropwort (Spiraea filipendula). tivation, with small flowers of a peach-blossom color. Goats' beard (8. aruncus) is another native from New York westward, found also in Europe, with numerous slender spikes of dioecious, whitish flowers. Dropwort (8. fili- pendula), from Europe, has large cymes of white or pink-tipped flowers. The fine her- baceous plant which is often called spircea Japonica belongs to the saxifrage family; its proper name is astilbe Japonica. SPIRAL VESSELS. See AIB VESSELS. SPIRE, or Spires (Ger. Speyer or Speier), a town of Bavaria, capital of the district of the Palatinate, on the left bank of the Rhine, at its junction with the Speyerbach, 16 m. N. E. of Landau ; pop. in 1871, 13,241. It has a ca- thedral in the Romanesque style, remarkable for its size and antiquity ; it was damaged by the French in 1689, but has been partly re- stored with great splendor ; it contains the tombs of eight emperors, fine monuments, and a hall of antiquities. Very little is left of the imperial palace, where in 1529 the diet was held at which the Reformed princes made the protest from which originated the name of Protestants. Spire was a Roman military sta- tion under the name of Augusta Nemetum (pre- viously Noviomagus), and is said to have had a Christian community in the 2d century, and a bishop in the 3d. In the 7th century it was known under the Latin name of Spira. The town became of great importance as the ordi- nary residence of the emperors of Germany, and the seat of the imperial chamber or su- preme court of appeal and of several diets. The French laid it in ashes May 31, 1689. It was rebuilt in 1699, but never recovered its ancient prosperity. After the French occu- pation (1801-'14) it was in 1816 given to Ba- varia. The bishopric of Spire, one of the oldest in Germany, long enjoyed the rights of sovereignty, and the prince-bishops, whose castle was at Bruchsal, had an enormous in- come. More than half of the territory was given to France by the treaty of Luneville, Feb. 9, 1801, and the rest to Baden in 1802. SPIRIT OF SALT. See HTDEOCHLOEIC ACID. t SPIRITUALISM, a term formerly used to de- signate the doctrines and religious life of a class of mystics who professed to be under the sensible guidance of the Divine Spirit, and who were distinguished by a habit of spiritual- izing the Sacred Scriptures. Jacob Boehm, Miguel de Molinos, Mme. Guyon, and Mme. de Bourignon, though not all ostensibly of the same communion, are representatives of the somewhat numerous class of religionists, par- ticularly of the 17th century, to whose teach- ings and practice the appellation of spiritualism has been applied. Latterly, however, the word has been employed exclusively to designate the belief of those who regard certain accred- ited phenomena, physical and mental, as the result of the action of spirits, influencing. and using persons of a peculiarly sensitive organi- zation, known as mediums. In France Allan Kardec (the pseudonyme of Le"on Hippolyte Denisart Rivail), who specially investigated the American phenomena, defined it as follows: " Properly speaking, spiritualism is the op- posite of materialism. "Whoever believes he has within him something distinguished from matter is a spiritualist ; but it may not follow that he believes in the existence of spirits, or in their communications with the visible world. To designate this latter belief we employ, in place of the words spiritualism, spiritualist, the words spiritism, spiritist." Spiritualists assert that phenomena nearly identical with the man- ifestations of modern spiritualism appear in many ancient histories, in the Delphic oracles, in the lives of seers and clairvoyants, in the facts of witchcraft in all ages, in the Ted- worth occurrences related by Glanvill (1661), in the Camisard marvels in France (1686- 1707), in the occurrences in the Wesley family (1716), in Swedenborg's alleged full and open communication with the spirit world and dai- ly converse with spirits and angels more than a century ago, in the records of mesmerism and somnambulism, in the traditions of count- less families, and in the innumerable published accounts of remarkable dreams, predictions, and physical phenomena. Clairvoyance ap- pears to have played an important part in the introduction of modern spiritualism, and a historical sketch of the latter, to be com- plete, must include some notice of the former. Jung-Stilling (1740-1817), in his writings on pneumatology, noticed that clairvoyants, du- ring their more exalted states of ecstasis, pro- fessed, with what seemed to him satisfactory evidence, to be in converse with invisible in-