ered from weakness in the head,
and her mental faculties were impaired. In short, she died.

Again, other communications which do not fit in with the telepathic
theory are those from very young children. When they communicate a short
time after death, they reproduce their childish gestures, they repeat
the few words they had begun to stammer; they ask by gestures for the
toys they liked. All these details are evidently to be found in the
minds of the parents. But when these children communicate long years
after their death, it is as if they had grown in the other world; they
only rarely allude to the impressions of their babyhood, even when these
impressions remain vivid in the minds of the father and mother. George
Pelham was one day acting as intermediary for a child who had been dead
many years. The mother naturally spoke of him as a child, and George
Pelham remonstrated, "Roland is a gentleman; he is not a little
boy."[51]

FOOTNOTES:

[44] _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol. xiii. p. 370.

[45] _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol. xiii. p. 494.

[46] _Ibid._, p. 495.

[47] _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol. vi. p. 514.

[48] _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol. vi. p. 509.

[49] _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol. xiii. p. 416.

[50] _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol. xiii. p. 496.

[51] _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol. xiii. p. 512.

CHAPTER IX

Further consideration of the difficulties of the problem--George
Pelham--Development of the automatic writing.

Phinuit's empire remained uncontested till the month of March 1892. He
sometimes yielded his place to other controls, but rarely through a
whole sitting. However, in March 1892, a new communicator appeared, who
imposed his collaboration on Phinuit, with the latter's consent or
without it. This newcomer called himself George Pelham,[52] and asserted
that he was the disincarnated spirit of a young man of thirty-two, who
had been killed four or five weeks before by a horse accident. However
that may be, this new control had more culture, more moral elevation,
and a greater love of truth than the so-called French doctor. The latter
benefited by the companionship; he tried to be more truthful, and seemed
to make fewer appeals to his imagination; in short, all the sittings
improved, even those in which Phinuit appeared alone.

The newcomer did everything in his power to establish his identity. His
success is still a matter open to discussion, in the view of some
persons, and their doubts at least prove that, in order to so