on. It almost seems as if a life cut suddenly and violently
short had some store of unspent vitality which could still manifest
itself in a strange, mischievous fashion. Later I had another singular
personal experience of this sort which I may describe at the end of
this argument.[1]

[1] Vide Appendix III.

From this period until the time of the War I continued in the leisure
hours of a very busy life to devote attention to this subject. I had
experience of one series of seances with very amazing results,
including several materializations seen in dim light. As the medium was
detected in trickery shortly afterwards I wiped these off entirely as
evidence. At the same time I think that the presumption is very clear,
that in the case of some mediums like Eusapia Palladino they may be
guilty of trickery when their powers fail them, and yet at other times
have very genuine gifts. Mediumship in its lowest forms is a purely
physical gift with no relation to morality and in many cases it is
intermittent and cannot be controlled at will. Eusapia was at least
twice convicted of very clumsy and foolish fraud, whereas she several
times sustained long examinations under every possible test condition
at the hands of scientific committees which contained some of the best
names of France, Italy, and England. However, I personally prefer to
cut my experience with a discredited medium out of my record, and I
think that all physical phenomena produced in the dark must necessarily
lose much of their value, unless they are accompanied by evidential
messages as well. It is the custom of our critics to assume that if
you cut out the mediums who got into trouble you would have to cut out
nearly all your evidence. That is not so at all. Up to the time of
this incident I had never sat with a professional medium at all, and
yet I had certainly accumulated some evidence. The greatest medium of
all, Mr. D. D. Home, showed his phenomena in broad daylight, and was
ready to submit to every test and no charge of trickery was ever
substantiated against him. So it was with many others. It is only
fair to state in addition that when a public medium is a fair mark for
notoriety hunters, for amateur detectives and for sensational
reporters, and when he is dealing with obscure elusive phenomena and
has to defend himself before juries and judges who, as a rule, know
nothing about the conditions which influence the phenomena, it would be
won