means there was confessedly no trace.
The disturbances ceased after she was dismissed--nothing else connects her
with them.

Mr. Podmore's attempt at a normal explanation by fraud, therefore, is
of no weight. He has to exaggerate the value, as disproof, of such
discrepancies as occur in all human evidence on all subjects. He has to
lay stress on the interval of five weeks between the events and the
collection of testimony by himself. But contemporary accounts appeared in
the local newspapers, and he does not compare the contemporary with the
later evidence, as we have done. There is one discrepancy which looks as
if a witness, not here cited, came to think he had seen what he heard
talked about. Finally, after abandoning the idea that mechanical means can
possibly have produced the effect, Mr. Podmore falls back on the cunning
of a half-witted girl whom nothing shows to have been half-witted. The
alternative is that the girl was 'the instrument of mysterious agencies.'

So much for the hypothesis of a fraud, which has been identical in results
from China to Peru and from Greenland to the Cape.

We now turn to the other, and concomitantly active cause, in Mr. Podmore's
theory, hallucination. 'Many of the witnesses described the articles as
moving slowly through the air, or exhibiting some peculiarity of flight.'
(See e.g. the Worksop case.) Mr. Podmore adds another English case,
presently to be noted, and a German one. 'In default of any experimental
evidence' (how about Mr. William Crookes's?) 'that disturbances of this
kind are ever due to abnormal agency, I am disposed to explain the
appearance of moving slowly or flying as a sensory illusion, conditioned
by the excited state of the percipient.' ('Studies,' 157, 158.)

Before criticising this explanation, let us give the English affair,
alluded to by Mr. Podmore.

The most curious modern case known to me is not of recent date, but it
occurred in full daylight, in the presence of many witnesses, and the
phenomena continued for weeks. The events were of 1849, and the record is
expanded, by Mr. Bristow, a spectator, from an account written by him in
1854. The scene was Swanland, near Hull, in a carpenter's shop, where Mr.
Bristow was employed with two fellow workmen. To be brief, they were
pelted by odds and ends of wood, about the size of a common matchbox. Each
blamed the others, till this explanation became untenable. The workrooms
and space above were searched to