MR. MASKELYNE AND MR. SLADE.
[To TRH EDITOR OF THE SPROTATOR.1
Sin,—Notwithstanding your intimation that the discussion must not be prolonged, I hope you will allow me to make the reply which seems necessary to Mr. Maskelyne's long letter. I did not, as you justly point out, charge Mr. Maskelyne with intentional untruth. But I say it is utterly untrue in fact that he reproduced the effects—call them tricks, if you please —deposed to by the witnesses we were allowed to call for the defence, who were only a few of those we had ready to give similar testimony. Mr. Maskelyne exhibited his devices in the witness-box before he had heard our evidence, and they were quite inapplicable to it. He has himself quoted the reply he made to me when I put to him, in cross-examination, part of the ease we were prepared to prove, the reply in which he talked of "hallucination," and admitted that he could not do such things by his own art. But if what I described in my questions to Mr. Maskelyne did not really happen, at least Mr. Slade produced on many of his sitters the impression that it did, and the " expert " neither showed, nor professed to show, how this impression—the " trick " to which Mr. Slade owed all his success—was produced. Nor did the Magistrate who heard the case attribute any im- portance to Mr. Maskelyne's performances and explanations.
On the contrary, he described the testimony we had adduced as " overwhelming ; " but in giving judgment, he expressly excluded it from consideration, basing his decision avowedly upon "inferences from the known course of Nature," in rela- tion to the particular evidence of the two principal witnesses for the prosecution.
Mr. Maskelyne, in his letter, treats as one the two state- ments that he gave evidence as an expert, and that he "per- formed Sla.de's tricks in the witness-box," and suggests that my contradiction may be read as covering the whole. I do not see how that can be, as I carefully and distinctly separated the two statements, and confined my denial to the latter, which I quoted in inverted commas.—I am, Sir, Stc.,
124 Victoria Street, S.W., May 7th. C. C. MASSEY.
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