Life and scientific work of Peter Guthrie Tait, supplementing the two volumes of Scientific papers published in 1898 and 1900

He kept a diary of his observations with scientific precision. For many years his special subject was Friederike Hauffe, the wife of a tradesman. He recorded her somnambulist phenomena in the two-volumed work Die Seherin von Prevorst. I possess the first edition of 1829, and so do not have to refer to extracts from Kerner's work in scientific publications, which often quote him. Friederike Hauffe came from the village of Prevorst near the Wurttemberg town of Lowenstein, in a mountainous district, whose inhabitants, says Kerner, were open to sidereal and magnetic influences. Father Hauffe was a gamekeeper. Friederike was brought up 'simply and naturally'. Never spoiled, she grew up to be a 'blooming, vivacious' child. Whereas her brothers and sisters were bothered by apparitions this peculiarity was not found in Friederike, but she did develop a power of foretelling the future that was announced to her in dreams. She became the 'wife of a tradesman', had children and led a bourgeois existence, but her emotional life became so intense that 'she heard and felt everything over the greatest distances' ...»