Arthur Conan Doyle, ironically, made a mistake that Sherlock also made. In "A Scandal in Bohemia" (The first short story featuring Sherlock, and the 3rd overall story), Sherlock is outsmarted in the end because he underestimates the person he was investigating (a woman) due to her status. In much the same way, Arthur himself was fooled because he underestimated how skillful working class children could be with photography.
He also had a man, who was already very adamant on the existence of fairies, be the one to investigate the scene of the crime for authenticity (the crime, in this case, being fraud. Though neither of them knew that.) I don't have a story to compare this to, because Sherlock never did that as far as I'm aware... Well, I haven't seen the Sherlock Gnomes movie, so maybe he did it in that.
One thing I notice is that, in the PDF, it lists a 4th mistake in regards to them getting the girls to get more pictures, but that's actually fairly scientific. Being able to reproduce results is vitally important to any theory, and since they (erroneously) ruled out the girls faking the pictures themselves, they had no reason to doubt these new ones.
Once more I am tasked with rummaging through old-timey prose to salvage anything remotely understandable to the average modern person (I mean, she used the word "vouchsafed" for god's sake, how many times have you heard someone use that? I've heard it exactly once, and it was from this paper)
Something Jane observes is trauma/loss on the part of those coming to see the devil baby. One particular story is that of a woman who had eleven kids, all dead by now, but the one that lived the longest witnessed her father having (what is most likely) a psychotic break and trying to kill her and her mother, which -while it's horrible to compare these two- kinda reminds me of The Shining. The daughter does shockingly well for a while considering, y'know, all that stuff I just described, but eventually starts wandering off so much that the mom had to put her in an insane asylum (and given that this is a 1910s asylum, I doubt it did anything to improve her mental health). Though, eventually, the daughter died, and the asylum didn't inform the mom until the day after it happened, talk about callous!
I think when you go through trauma or loss (like Arthur, or the old ladies from Hull House), you lose an aspect of your life, a hole that some might seek to fill with a new, previously unknown aspect. Something unmapped, uncharted, like a new species, or psionics. Something equally big and upending but in a positive direction instead of a negative one.
From a strictly literal sense, I agree that it is completely within the realms of science for some people to see something that others find invisible, as an example: snakes can see infrared light. Though I don't understand what he meant by "Victorian science would have left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon", was it metaphorical, that we would suck the life or wonder out of the world? Or did he mean it in a literal, "Victorian science would've turned earth into a desolate wasteland" kind of way?
As for a mystery beyond science, I think it's possible for something to hypothetically exist which happens to have traits that are inversions of everything science can explain. You can perform science on stuff you can see? well this thing is invisible. You can perform science based on the affects it has on other things? well guess what buddy, it's intangible, doesn't interact with matter or energy. You can make informed inferences based on things you already know to exist? well wouldn't you know it, this thing is completely unrelated to any other concept or phenomenon in the universe, but at that point, there is no real difference between it existing and it not existing. Philosophy and all that, y'know?
Hi reader, have you ever seen one of those plush monkeys with the long noodle arms? Don't you wish they were alive and threw wood at you? Well you're in luck! The Northern region of the U.S.A has a delightful creature of folklore called the Agropelter. I'll just rip it's description from the 1910 book: "Fearsome Creatures in the Lumberwoods: With a Few Deserts and Mountain Beasts". "According to Ole, the animal has a slender, wiry body, the villainous face of an ape, and arms like muscular whiplashes, with which it can snap off branches and hurl them through the air like a six-inch gun."
Said to live in hollowed out trees and pelt passersby with branches, they were blamed every time a woodsman was injured by a random falling branch. Agropelter's are what's called a "fearsome critter," a type of cryptid made and spread as a joke, and not seriously believed in. They're quite obscure, their Wikipedia page is only 3 paragraphs long, and one of those paragraphs is just a single sentence!
I don't personally believe this exists, partly because I don't really believe in cryptids, but mostly because It was literally made as a joke/scapegoat for when people got injured/died from falling wood. Still, I love its unique, noodle-armed look.
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