ory of discarnate intelligences.
Venzano observed that the forms occurred in several places at once, that
they appeared in many shapes and many guises. Some were like children,
some had curly hair, some had beards. In one case identification was
made by introducing the finger of one of the sitters within the phantom
mouth to prove the loss of a molar tooth. Sometimes the hair of these
heads was plaited like that of a girl. Some of the hands were large and
black, others fair and pink--like a child's. In short, he argues that
the medium could not have determined the size, shape, or color of the
phantoms."

"All that does not really militate against the ideoplastic theory," I
retorted. "It is as easy to produce a phantom with hair plaited as it is
to produce one with hair in curls. If it is a case of the modelling of
the etheric vapor by the mind of the psychic, these differences would be
produced naturally enough. The forcible handling of the medium by the
invisible ones is a much more difficult thing for me to explain, for to
imagine the psychic emitting a form of force which afterward proceeds to
raise the psychic herself against her will--as Mrs. Smiley testifies
happened again and again in her youth--is to do violence to all that we
know of natural law. And yet it may be that the etheric double is able
to take on part of the forces resident in the circle of sitters, and so
become immensely more potent than the psychic himself, as in the case of
the 'Man from Mars'--the Hercules I have just been telling you about.
Then, as to the content of these messages, they may be impulses, hints,
fragments of sentences caught from the air as one wireless operator
intercepts communications meant for other stations than his own. So that
my interview with 'E. A.' may have been a compounding of the psychic,
Blake, and myself, and fugitive natures afloat in the ether. In fact, I
am not as near a belief in the return of the dead as I was when I began
this last series of experiments. These Italian scientific observers, I
confess, have profoundly affected my thought."

"Your idea is, then," said Miller, "that these apparitions are
emanations of the medium's physical substance, moulded by his will and
colored by the minds of his sitters?"

"That is the up-to-date theory, and everything that I have experienced
seems capable of a biologic interpretation against it."

Fowler hastened to weaken the force of this statement. "Spiritists all