away when they felt themselves getting weak. The possibility of this
suggestion is interesting to those who prefer the hypothesis of
telepathy.

FOOTNOTES:

[77] Professor Hyslop's report is contained in _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol.
xvi.

CHAPTER XIV

The communications of Mr Robert Hyslop--Peculiar expressions--Incidents.

After we have read the report of Professor Hyslop, weighed the slightest
facts with him, discussed the arguments for and against with him, we
cannot be surprised at his having ended by adhering to the spiritualist
hypothesis; in other words, we cannot be surprised that, in spite of his
previous prejudice, he should have ended by exclaiming, "I have been
talking with my father, my brother, my uncles. Whatever supernormal
powers we may be pleased to attribute to Mrs Piper's secondary
personalities, it would be difficult to make me believe that these
secondary personalities could have thus completely reconstituted the
mental personality of my dead relatives. To admit this would involve me
in too many improbabilities. I prefer to believe that I have been
talking to my dead relatives in person; it is simpler." This is the
conclusion at which Professor Hyslop has arrived, and he takes the
reader with him, in spite of himself. As may be imagined, I do not
pretend to do the same in a hurried sketch like the present. Here, as
was the case with George Pelham, the incidents quoted are only examples
selected from a great number; some important detail of the said
incidents may even be accidentally omitted. If the forgotten detail
lays the incident open to some great objection, the reader must blame me
only for it, and turn to Professor Hyslop's book for himself.[78]

Professor Hyslop's father, Mr Robert Hyslop, was a private person in the
strictest sense of the word; he never did anything to attract public
attention to him; he did not write in the papers, and never, or hardly
ever, lived in towns. He was born in 1821, and lived on his farm in Ohio
till 1889, when he went into a neighbouring State. He returned to his
old home in August 1896, ill with a sort of cancer of the larynx. The
old home then belonged to his brother-in-law, James Carruthers, and he
died there on the 29th of the same month. In 1860 he had contracted a
spinal affection, the result of over-exertion, and this had degenerated,
some years later, into locomotor ataxy; he lost by degrees the use of
one of his legs and used a crutch; there