Projection of Moving Pictures.

The Edison Kinetograph—Reynaud’s Optical Theater—Electric Tachyscope—Apparatus for Projecting Moving Pictures by the Demeny, Jenkins, Lumière, and Other Forms of Apparatus—The Kinetoscope Stereopticon—The Mutoscope and the Mutograph, with Illustrations of Moving Objects—“Cinematograph” Camera—Camera for Ribbon Photography—The Micromotoscope, 488 APPENDIX. ADDITIONAL TRICKS. The Magic Table—“Gone”—The Spider and the Fly—The Trunk Trick—“La Strobeika Persane”—“Metempsychosis,” 519 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS ON NATURAL MAGIC, 539 INDEX, 553

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MAGIC:
STAGE ILLUSIONS AND SCIENTIFIC DIVERSIONS,
INCLUDING TRICK PHOTOGRAPHY.

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INTRODUCTION.
THE MYSTERIES OF MODERN MAGIC.

By Henry Ridgely Evans.

I.

Far back into the shadowy past, before the building of the pyramids, magic was a reputed art in Egypt, for Egypt was the “cradle of magic.” The magicians of Egypt, according to the Bible chronicle, contended against Aaron, at the court of Pharaoh. The Hebrew prophet “cast down his rod before Pharaoh and before his servants, and it became a serpent. Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments. For they cast down every man his rod and they became serpents: but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.” [Exodus vii. 10, 11, 12.]

The late Robert Heller, prestidigitateur, traveler in the Orient, and skeptic, once told me that he had seen this feat performed in Cairo many times by the Dervishes. The rods actually were serpents and hypnotized to such an extent as to become perfectly stiff and rigid. When thrown upon the earth and recalled to life by sundry mystic passes and strokes, they crawled away alive and hideous as ever. Said Heller: “It was in the open air that I saw this strange feat performed. Transferred to the gloomy audience chamber of some old palace, where the high roof is supported by ponderous stone columns painted with hieroglyphics, where rows of black marble sphinxes stare at you with unfathomable eyes, where the mise en scène is awe-inspiring—this trick of the rods turning into serpents becomes doubly impressive, and indeed to the uninitiated a miracle.”

In the British Museum is an Egyptian papyrus, which contains an account of a magical séance given by a certain Tchatcha-em-ankh before King Khufu, B.C. 3766. In this manuscript it is stated of the magician: “He knoweth how to bind on a head which hath been cut off, he knoweth how to make a lion follow him as if led by a rope, and he knoweth the number of the stars of the house (constellation) of Thoth.” The decapitation trick is thus no new thing, while the experiment performed with the lion, undoubtedly a hypnotic feat, shows hypnotism to be old.

The art of natural magic, then, dates back to the remotest periods of antiquity. It was an art cultivated by the Egyptian, Chaldean, Jewish, Roman, and Grecian priesthoods, being used by them to dupe the ignorant masses. Weeping and bleeding statues, temple doors that flew open with thunderous sound and apparently by supernatural means, and perpetual lamps that flamed forever in the tombs of holy men, were some of the thaumaturgic feats of the Pagan priests. Heron, a Greek mechanician and mathematician, who lived in the second century before Christ, wrote several interesting treatises on automata and magical appliances, used in the ancient temples. Colonel A. De Rochas, in an interesting work, Les Origines de la Science, has given in detail Heron’s accounts of these wonderful automata and experiments in natural magic. St. Hippolytus, one of the Fathers of the early Christian Church, also described and exposed in his works many of these wonders.

Magic is divided, according to old writers on the occult, into: White magic, Black magic, and Necromancy. Modern magic, or conjuring, is divided by Robert-Houdin into five classes, as follows:

In the Middle Ages magic was greatly in vogue and we read strange stories of ghosts, goblins, and gnomes in the literature of that period. Shriveled old women were burned at the stake for the crime of witchcraft, monks in their gloomy cells wrestled with Satan and the powers of darkness, and grimy alchemists toiled day and night over the red fires of their furnaces, seeking in vain for the talismanic philosopher’s stone and wondrous elixir of life. With the aid of the concave mirror, magicians of the period were able to produce very fair ghost illusions to gull a susceptible public. Benvenuto Cellini chronicles one in his fascinating autobiography.

Cellini, as guileless as a child in matters of science, desiring to study sorcery, applied to a Sicilian priest who was a professed dabbler in the occult art. One dark night they repaired to the ruins of the Coliseum, at Rome; the monk described a circle on the ground and placed himself and the great goldsmith within its mystic outlines; a fire was built, intoxicating perfumes cast on it, and soon an impenetrable smoke arose. The man of the cowl then waved his wand in the air, pronounced sundry cabalistic words, and legions of demons were seen dancing in the air, to the great terror of Cellini. The story of this spirit séance reads like an Arabian tale, but it is easily explainable. The priest had a brother confederate concealed among the ruins, who manipulated a concave mirror, by means of which painted images were thrown on the smoke. Later on Nostradamus conjured up the vision of