HELLER'S SECOND-SIGHT.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1585, 19 March 1879, Page 4

HELLER'S SECOND-SIGHT.

Robert Heller, the noted magician and pianist, who died at Philadelphia last November, was the son of Mr Henry Palmer, a highly-respected professor of music, of good social standing, and was born in Canterbury, England, in the year 1828. William Henry Palmer, whose nom de guerre was " Robert Heller," received a good education at the collegiate school of Professor Stocker, at Boughton, Eent, and afterwards became a fellow of the Royal Academy, London. At the age of ten years he was a musical prodigy, and at sixteen he appeared in concerts, and bad composed several brilliant studios for the pianoforte. His musical career was hindered by his boyish fancy for the illusions of magic —at first a mere recreation, afterwards an an infatuation. His marriage was not a happy one, and he undertook a "magical" expedition around tho world, accompanied by MiBS Ada Palmer, his step-sister, and who from that time assisted at his entertainments as Miss Heller. Mr Heller leaves a wife and three children, residing in Paris, a married Bister in England, and a brother, a lawyer, in Australia. Robert Heller will be remembered for his second-sight trick more than for anything else. That feature of his performances, consisting of the description, by a blindfold woman on the stage, of articles touched by him in the audience, waß not new with him, but he carried it to a greater degree of mystification than any of Mb predecessors. The late Mr Anderson and his daughter used to do it cleverly, and many others have tried it with more or less success. The wildost explanatory theories have been gravely advanced, but it is altogether likely that the celebrated French juggler, Robert Houdin, by whom the feat was performed, gave in his autobiography tho correct solution. Houdin said that, by a complex system of new meanings for letters, syllables, and words, he was able to tell his confederate on the stage what the articles were, while using language to the audience whioh conveyed no hidden intelligence. That is to say, a language within a language was constructed, so that the question, " What iB this ? " might mean, " This is a gold ring with one stone." It is easily concoivable that a man of Heller's quick intelligence could, in a dozen years or more of constant practice, elaborate such a system to a wonderful extent, and devise variations—like the touching of a few previously arranged articles without saying anything—that would mislead a casual observer. One point seemed to prove that he used Houdin's method. He would never permit anybody but himself to put the questions to the blindfolded woman.