Letter from Mr. Mathieu on mediumship in birds.

— Paris, August 11, 1861.

Sir, It is I who write to you yet again and, if you permit, to render a new homage to the truth.

Only today was I able to read, in the last number of the Review, your excellent observations on the alleged mediumistic faculty of birds, and I hasten to thank you for it with one more service rendered to the cause we both defend.

Several exhibitions of marvelous birds have occurred in these last years. As I knew the principal trick of the feats performed by these interesting fowls, I listened with much pain and regret to certain spiritualists, or Spiritists, attributing these exploits to a mediumistic action, which must have made the owners of these birds smile in petto, if I may so express myself. But what they did not seem in any hurry to deny, I come to deny on their behalf, since you furnish me the occasion, not in order to harm their trade, which would distress me, but to prevent a deplorable confusion between the facts that an ingenious patience and a certain dexterity of hands produce in them alone and that the intervention of the Spirits produces in us. You are entirely right when you say: “These birds do things that neither the most intelligent of men, nor even the most lucid somnambulist could do, leading one to conclude that they would be endowed with intellectual faculties superior to those of man and thus contradicting the laws of Nature.” This consideration ought to strike full upon excessively enthusiastic persons, who do not fear to resort to the mediumistic faculty in order to explain experiments which, at first sight, they do not understand. Unfortunately, cold and judicious observers are still very rare, and, among the distinguished men who follow our studies, there are those who do not always know how to defend themselves against the exaltation of the imagination and the dangers of illusion. Now, do you wish me to tell you what was communicated to me regarding these marvelous birds, of which, if you recall, we together admired a specimen one evening? One of my friends, a lover of all possible curiosities, showed me one day a long wooden rack, in which were placed, in great number, small cards, arranged one beside another. On these cards were printed words, numbers, playing-card pictures, etc. “I bought it,” he said to me, “from a man who exhibited learned birds.” The sale also included the manner of using it. Then my friend, drawing several of these cards from the rack, made me notice that the upper and lower edges were, one complete, the other formed by two leaves, separated by an almost imperceptible slit and, above all, invisible at a distance.

He then explained to me that these cards were to be placed in the rack, now with the slit directed downward, now upward, according to whether one wanted the bird to draw them from the rack with its beak, or not to touch them. The bird had been previously trained to draw to itself all the cards in which it perceived a slit. It seems that this preliminary instruction was given to it by means of canary seed, or any other tidbit, placed in the slit in question; it ended by acquiring the habit of pecking and thus of drawing from the rack all the slit cards it found there, walking backward. Such, sir, is the ingenious ruse that my friend made known to me. Everything leads me to believe that this is common to all the persons who exploit the trade of intelligent birds. There remains to such persons the merit of training them for this handling with much patience and, perhaps, a little fasting – for the birds, be it understood. There remains to them, also, with the greatest possible skill, the merit of saving appearances, whether by connivance, or by skillful sleight of hand in the handling of the cards, as in that of the accessories that figure in their experiments. I thus regret to reveal the most important of their secrets. But, on the one hand, the public will see with no less pleasure birds so well trained, even at the risk of becoming a witness to impossible things; on the other hand, it was not possible for me to allow any longer that an opinion be accepted, when its propagation leads only to the profanation of our studies. In the presence of so sacred an interest, I believe that a complacent silence would be an exaggerated scruple. If this be also your opinion, sir, you are free to communicate this notice to your readers. Accept, etc.

Mathieu.

— We certainly agree with Mr. Mathieu and are happy to have met with him on this question. We thank him for the details he has been good enough to transmit to us, which will, no doubt, please our readers. Spiritism is rich enough in remarkable, authentic facts, without admitting those which relate to the marvelous and the impossible. Only a serious and thorough study of the Spiritist science can put very credulous persons on their guard, considering that such study, in giving the key to the phenomena, teaches them the limits within which these can be produced. We said that if the birds operated their prodigies with knowledge of the cause and by the effort of intelligence, they would do what neither the most intelligent of men nor the most lucid somnambulist can do. This reminds us of the successor of the celebrated Munito, whom we saw, twenty-five or thirty years ago, invariably win the card game from his partner, and give the total of a sum before we could make the calculation. Now, without vanity, we judge ourselves a little stronger in calculation than that dog. Without the least doubt, there were marked cards there, as in the case of the birds. As for somnambulists, there are some, incontestably, who are lucid enough to do things as surprising as those done by these interesting animals, which does not prevent our proposition from being true. It is known that somnambulistic lucidity, even the most developed, is, by nature, essentially variable and intermittent; that it is subordinate to a multitude of circumstances and, above all, to the influence of the surrounding environment; that the somnambulist rarely sees instantaneously; that often he cannot see at a given instant, or that he will see an hour later, or the next day; that what he sees with one person, he will not see with another. Supposing there were in the learned animals an analogous faculty, it would be necessary to admit that they suffered no influence capable of disturbing it; that they had it always at their disposal, at any hour, twenty times a day, if necessary, and without any alteration. It is above all with respect to this aspect that we say they do what the most lucid somnambulist is incapable of doing. What characterizes the tricks of sleight of hand is precision, punctuality, instantaneity, optional repetition, all things contrary to the essence of the purely moral phenomena of somnambulism and of Spiritism, whose effects one must always await and which can only rarely be provoked. Even if the effects of which we have just spoken were due to artificial processes, they would prove nothing against the mediumship of animals in general.

Thus, the question would be to know whether or not there exists in them the possibility of serving as intermediaries between the Spirits and men. Now, the incompatibility of their nature, in this respect, is demonstrated by the dissertation of Erasto, published in our August number [Animal mediums], and that of the same Spirit on the role of mediums in communications, inserted in that of the month of July.