Page:The humbugs of the world - An account of humbugs, delusions, impositions, quackeries, deceits and deceivers generally, in all ages (IA humbugsworld00barnrich).djvu/152

 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 indorse 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 some one 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