Translator's Note

Carl du Prel (1839 to 1899) published Die Magie als Naturwissenschaft in two parts at Jena, with Hermann Costenoble, in 1899, the year of his death; his preface is signed at Partenkirchen. This is the first part, Die magische Physik: ten chapters on telepathy, the od of Reichenbach, magnetized water, levitation, table-turning, the stones thrown in haunted houses and the divining rod, which du Prel sets out to explain as natural science not yet known. It runs to 201 pages. The second part, Die magische Psychologie, follows as a separate title.

This translation is made from the page images of the New York Public Library’s copy, digitized by Google and kept on the Internet Archive. Where that copy is smudged or blank, as some thirty of its pages are, the German was read from the page images of a second scan of the same printing, also from the New York Public Library; one leaf missing from that scan and illegible in the first was read from a third, kept on the Internet Archive under Google’s number for it. A few words that no copy shows are marked […]. The scans’ machine-read text was used only to find places.

The English keeps du Prel’s ten chapters, with the subsections of the second and seventh, and his paragraphs as he printed them. Each heading is given in English and then as he printed it. His own footnotes stay beside the paragraph that carries them, numbered as he numbered them page by page; their titles are kept in the languages he cited them in. Words he set in spaced type are in italics. His Latin and French quotations are translated, with the Latin kept beside the English where he quotes it at length. The publisher’s notice inside the cover, the title page and the dedication are translated in their places; the printer’s line is kept at the end; the publisher’s advertisements bound after the book are left out. The page numbers of 1899 are not reproduced.

The text is translated without modern commentary. A few notes, marked with a dagger and a roman numeral and gathered at the end, give the source of the motto and the wording of the Bible verses du Prel quotes or retells, in the King James and the Revised Standard Versions; each says where its information comes from.