(Vol. viii., p. 57.)
Respecting the origin of this curious phenomenon in America, I am not able
to give your correspondent, J. G. T. of Hagley, any information; but it may
interest him and others among the readers of "N. & Q." to have some account
of what appears to be the first recorded experiment, made in Europe, of
table-moving. These experiments are related in the supplement (now lying
before me) to the _Allgemeine Zeitung_ of April 4, by Dr. K. Andrée, who
writes from Bremen on the subject. His letter is dated March 30, and begins
by stating that the whole town had been for eight days preceding in a state
of most peculiar excitement, owing to a phenomenon which entirely absorbed
the attention of all, and about which no one had ever thought before the
arrival of the American steam-ship "Washington" from New York. Dr. Andrée
proceeds to relate that the information respecting table-moving was
communicated in a letter, brought through that ship, from a native of
Bremen, residing in New York, to his sister, who was living in Bremen, and
who, in her correspondence with her brother, had been rallying him about
the American spirit-rappings, and other Yankee humbug, as she styled it, so
rampant in the United States. Her brother instanced this table-moving,
performed in America, as no delusion, but as a fact, which might be
verified by any one; and then gave some directions for making the
experiment, which was forthwith attempted at the lady's house in Bremen,
and with perfect success, in the presence of a large company. In a few days
the marvellous feat, the accounts of which flew like wildfire all over the
country, was executed by hundreds of experimenters in Bremen. The subject
was one precisely adapted to excite the attention and curiosity of the
imaginative and wonder-loving Germans; and, accordingly, in a few days
after, a notice of the strange phenomenon appeared in _The Times_, in a
letter from Vienna, and, through the medium of the leading journal, the
facts and experiments became rapidly diffused over the world, and have been
repeated and commented upon ten thousand fold. As the experiment and its
results are now brought within the domain of practical science, we may hope
to see them soon freed from the obscurity and uncertainty which still
envelope them, and assigned to their proper place in the wondrous system of
"Him, in whom we live, and move, and have our being."