emains another point to which it is well to draw attention in
order to avoid misunderstanding and disappointment. Experience shows
us that the medium perceives the person in question quite clearly, in
his present and usual state, but not necessarily in the exact
accidental state of the moment. She will tell you, for instance, that
she sees him ailing slightly, lying in a deck-chair in a garden of
such and such a kind, surrounded by certain flowers and petting a dog
of a certain size and breed. On enquiring, you will find that all
these details are strictly correct, with one exception, that at that
precise moment this person, who ordinarily spends his time in the
garden, was inside his house or calling on a neighbour. Mistakes in
time therefore are comparatively frequent and simultaneity between
action and vision comparatively rare. In short, the habitual often
masks the accidental action. This, I insist, is a point of which we
must not lose sight, lest we ask of psychometry more than it is
obviously able to give us.

2

Having said so much, is it open to us, amid all the mental anguish and
suffering which this terrible war has engendered, without profaning
the sorrow of our fellow-men and women, to give to those who are in
mortal fear as to the fate of some one whom they love the hope of
finding, among those extrahuman phenomena which have been unjustly and
falsely disparaged, a consoling gleam of light that shall not be a
mere mockery or delusion? I venture to declare--and I am doing so not
thoughtlessly, but after studying the problem with the conscientious
attention which it demands and after personally making a number of
experiments or causing them to be made under my supervision--I venture
to declare, without for a moment losing sight of the respect due to
grief, that we possess here, in these indisputable cases where no
normal mode of communication is possible, a strange but real and
serious source of information and comfort. I could mention a large
number of tests that have been made, so to speak, before my eyes by
absolutely trustworthy relatives or friends.

As my space is limited, I will relate only one, which typifies and
summarizes all the others very fairly. A mother had three sons at the
front. She was hearing pretty regularly from the eldest and the
second; but for some weeks the youngest, who was in the Belgian
trenches, where the fighting was very fierce, had given no sign of
life. Wild with anxie