en appear in these
pages.

To return to Mrs Piper and the phenomena which specially interest us.
Mrs Piper falls into trance spontaneously, without the intervention of
any magnetiser. I shall explain later, at length, what must be
understood by "trance."

Professor Charles Richet was one of the persons who had a sitting with
our medium while she was staying at Cambridge. He describes the trance
in these terms:--

"She is obliged to hold someone's hand in order to go into a trance. She
holds the hand several minutes, silently, in half-darkness. After some
time--from five to fifteen minutes--she is seized with slight spasmodic
convulsions, which increase, and terminate in a very slight epileptiform
attack. Passing out of this, she falls into a state of stupor, with
somewhat stertorous breathing; this lasts about a minute or two; then,
all at once, she comes out of the stupor with a burst of words. Her
voice is changed; she is no longer Mrs Piper, but another personage, Dr
Phinuit, who speaks in a loud, masculine voice in a mingling of negro
patois, French, and American dialect."

Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., well-known among English men of science, and
at the time Professor of Physics at Liverpool, describes the opening of
the trance in very nearly the same words as Professor Richet in the
remarkable report which he published in 1890 on the sittings he had with
Mrs Piper. He also notices the slight epileptiform attack, although he
adds that he is not "pretending to speak medically."[5]

The Phinuit personality, of which Professor Richet speaks in the passage
above quoted, is what the Spiritualists call a "control." By "control"
is meant the mysterious being who is supposed to have temporarily taken
possession of the organism of the medium. Are these controls only
secondary personalities, or are they, as they themselves declare,
disincarnated human spirits, spirits of dead men who come back to
communicate with us by using an entranced organism as a machine? In
either case they must have a name. Phinuit has been one of Mrs Piper's
principal controls, but he is far from having been the only one. On the
contrary, they have been legion, and, what is strange, these controls
appear to be personalities as distinct from each other as possible, each
with his own style of language, his belief, his opinions, his tricks of
speech or manner.

Mrs Piper's trance has changed its aspect a little with the development
and perfecting of