gate cases in which prima facie the evidence is good, and fraud is absent or, apparently, impossible. As for the conditions, it may conceivably be that just as photographs must be taken in the light and developed in the dark, so the curious growths to be described presently can only be developed in more or less com- plete darkness. But the inadequacy of the lighting, even in cases where red light is allowed sufficient to distinguish the hands and faces of the sitters, is a valid reason for demanding that the deeds done in the darkness of the seance-room shall be mechanically controlled by adequate substitutes for the sitters' senses of sight and touch, which the darkness puts out of action or renders untrustworthy. To secure this control, it would probably be necessary to construct a special laboratory in which extensive machinery (incapable of forgetting or being hallucinated) would record all the physical changes going on during the sitting. It reveals a curious lack of seriousness in the human attitude towards psychical research that no such laboratory had yet been provided anywhere.
In spite of these drawbacks, however, physical phenomena will not down. There have been plenty of frauds, and plenty of exposures, including that of an Italian medium of international fame, Eusapia Palladino, who began the decade well with a favourable Report by Mr. Everard Feilding and Mr. Baggally on a series of sittings she had given them in Naples (S.P.R. Proceedings, pt. 62, 1911). These investigators, though they re- reported many movements of objects they could not account for, nevertheless emphasized that Eusapia needed continuous watch- ing because she always cheated when she was given the chance. The chance was given her when she went to America in 1909, and the result was a very handsome and complete exposure, which eclipsed her reputation, even though many of her patrons continued to hold that nothing new had been proved against or about her mediumship, and that it was not wholly fraudulent. Still she died obscure (i9\8) and fashion took to other mediums.
At present a somewhat different type of physical phenomena is in vogue, in which puzzling movements occurring within the radius of the medium's arm or foot are no longer the staple of the performance, and which it is more difficult to set down to fraud, because the evidence is largely recorded in flashlight photographs, which seem on the face of it to involve the supernormal. In particular two or three cases of " materializations " seem to be deserving of further study. The first of these is connected with a French lady known as "Eva C.," whose mediumistic career goes back to 1906 and the " Villa Carmen " sittings at Algiers, which ended in the customary charges, and denials, of fraud. Some years later she turned up in Paris, living in the house of Mme. Alexandre Bisson, and her materialization phenomena speedily attracted attention. Early in 1914 the chief German psychical researcher, a medical man, Dr. von Schrenck-Notzing, published a lavishly illustrated book, Materialisations-Phaeno- mene, on the materializations of Eva and the similar performances of a Polish girl, Stanislava P.; owing to the war it was not trans- lated into English until 1920. It describes the elaborate pre- cautions taken against fraud and to secure the genuineness of the " materializations "; but the extraordinary flashlight photo- graphs of the plastic substance out of which they were built up are even more convincing than the physiological reports on its character. It is shown exuding from various parts of the medium's body, chiefly the mouth (whether or not the head and the hands were enclosed in muslin bags), hanging about the body in festoons, and forming itself into fingers, hands and faces, which are often incomplete and usually flat and picture-like. This of course gives a measure of support to the only explanation which the sceptics have so far been able to excogitate, viz. that the pictures are first swallowed by the medium and then " regurgitated." This theory, however, hardly explains how they manage to re- appear so unruffled, or how the " plasma " is got through the muslin bag when the medium's head is sewn up, and back again. Nor does the medical and microscopic examination of small samples of the plasma which Dr. von Schrenck-Notzing was allowed to take confirm a stomachic origin: its character appears to be epithelial. The reports of Mme. Bisson and Dr. von Schrenck-
Notzing were subsequently confirmed by a French medical man, Dr. Gustave Geley, in a lecture given to the Psychological Institute at the College de France in Jan. 1918, on " Super- normal Physiology and the Phenomena of Ideoplasty," and in the summer of 1920 " Eva C." was very searchingly examined by a committee of the S.P.R. in a series of sittings held in London: phenomena were not as copious as in Paris, nor on so large a scale; but their general character was confirmed, and no trace of fraud was detected (cf. S.P.R. Proceedings, pt. 81).
The " materializations " of "Eva C." seemed at first to receive independent support from the mediumship of Miss Kathleen Goligher of Belfast. This medium, and the family circle in which she sat, were exhaustively studied by Dr. W. J. Crawford, a lecturer in mechanical engineering in the local university, who described his conclusions in a series of books; The Reality of Psychic Phenomena appeared in 1916, Experi- ments in Psychical Science in 1919, while the third, The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle, delayed by the author's sudden death, appeared in Feb. 1921. They formed a graduated series, growing more and more sensational in their results, and in the end actually represented as visible facts what had originally been suggested as hypothetical inferences. In his first book Dr. Crawford, while candidly admitting that he believed the direct- ing intelligences concerned to be departed human spirits, set himself to study the mechanics of the phenomena observed, raps, levitations of the table, and other movements of objects, after establishing their supernormal character. For this purpose he used phonographs, manometers, spring balances and a variety of weighing machines, in a red light " nearly always " sufficient to show plainly the hands of the sitters, and proceeded to deter- mine exactly the amount and incidence of the forces employed in producing the movements. As a result of his experiments, he came to the conclusion that the mechanical effects observed could only be explained by postulating hypothetical structures, with a definite shape, connecting the bodies moved with the body of the medium at her ankles. These structures, which he called " psychic cantilevers " and " psychic rods," though invisible and intangible, had a size, shape and position which could be mapped by observing at what points the phenomena could be stopped by interposing between the medium and the objects moved.
In his second book Dr. Crawford extended these results, and showed that ordinarily the weight the bodies levitated was added to that of the medium (as if she held them), while when this psychic substance was weighed in a weighing pan at a distance from the medium, her weight would simultaneously be reduced; he claimed to have observed a temporary loss in this way of as much as 54 lb., nearly half her normal weight. He also stated that he obtained impressions on clay of the ends of such a " cantilever column." Finally these structures became visible, and his last book is adorned with flashlight photographs appearing to verify the correctness of his deductions about their origin and application. Moreover, in appearance they curiously resembled the "plasma" issuing from "Eva C." By ingeniously applying moist dyestuffs to various points in the stockings and underclothing of the medium, Crawford claimed to have determined the course taken by this " plasma " in issuing from, and returning into, the body of the medium, declaring also that he had felt the collapse and recuperation of her muscles which accompanied these processes. As his narrative stood, the Goligher case appeared to provide the most impressive evidence ever obtained for the reality of " materializations." Dr. Craw- ford's premature death in 1920 made it temporarily difficult to pursue independent inquiry into the matter; but at the end of 1921 further investigation by Dr. Fournier D'Albe proved that the manifestations were fraudulent.
Observations of so-called " telekinetic " phenomena, i.e. movements of small objects such as celluloid or pith balls, match- boxes, teaspoons, balances, etc., without contact, in the presence of a Polish lady, Stanislava Tomczyk (now Mrs. Everard Feilding), who had been " dissociated " in consequence of experiences during the Warsaw riots of 1906, were reported by Prof. I. Ochorowicz of Warsaw in the Annales des Sciences
