remembered in my excuse that as a
professional physiologist I moved habitually along a road quite other
than mystical.' His attention, he goes on to say, was first drawn to
spiritist phenomena by the word of a friend who had discovered a power
that caused a table to move intelligently. He was trying to explain this
and one or two other little things like telepathy and prophetic vision
by the word 'somnambulism,' when his friend Aksakof, a great psychical
expert, reproached him for not interesting himself more keenly in
experiments with mediums. 'Well,' said Richet, 'if I were sure that a
single true medium existed, I would willingly go to the ends of the
world to meet him.'"

"That's the spirit!" exclaimed Fowler. "That is the way the scientist
should feel. What then? Aksakof told him all he needed to do was to go
round the corner, didn't he?"

"Not exactly. Two years later Aksakof wrote to him: 'You needn't come to
the end of the world; Milan will do.' So Richet went to Milan, and took
part in those very celebrated seances with Eusapia. 'When I left Milan,'
Richet says, 'I was convinced that all was true; but no sooner was I
back in my accustomed channels of work than my doubts returned. I
persuaded myself that all had been fraud or illusion.'"

Here Harris interrupted: "Miller can testify to this inability to retain
a conviction. He, too, has slumped into doubt. How about it, Miller?"

"I never professed to believe," declared Miller.

"You were pretty well convinced that night in your study, weren't you?"
I asked.

"I was puzzled," he replied, guardedly.

There was a general smile of amusement at his manifest evasion, and I
resumed: "Richet went to Rome, and together with Schrenk-Noetzing, the
philosophic expert, and Siemeradski, the correspondent of the French
Institute, made other and still more convincing experiments, and yet
doubt persisted! 'I was not yet satisfied,' he says, further. '_I
invited Eusapia to my house for three months. Alone with her and
Ochorowicz, a man of penetrating perspicuity, I renewed my experiments
in the best possible conditions of solitude and quiet reflection. We
thus acquired a positive proof of the reality of the facts announced at
Milan._'"

"By George, that's going it strong!" said young Howard. "You've got to
believe that a man like Richet has seen something after three months'
experiment in his own house."

Miller faced them all stubbornly: "And yet even Richet may hav