, he came to England
to complete his education at Cambridge, he naturally gravitated into the
company of Sidgwick, Myers, and Gurney, as men busied in an undertaking
that appealed to his detective instinct. He was radically different from
them in temperament and point of view--not at all mystical, full of
animal spirits, fond of all manner of sports, and interested in occult
subjects only so far as they furnished working material for his nimble
and inquiring mind. The Cambridge trio, however, took kindly to him,
invited him to join the Society for Psychical Research, and two years
after its formation were instrumental in sending him to India to
investigate the methods of Madam Blavatsky, the high priestess of the
theosophic movement which was then winning adherents throughout the
civilized world.

From this inquiry he returned to England with an international
reputation as a detective of the supernatural. With the aid of two
disgruntled confederates of the theosophist leader, he had demonstrated
the falsity of the foundations on which her claims rested, and had shown
that downright swindling constituted a large part of her stock in trade.
With redoubled ardor he now plunged into the task of exposing the
spiritistic mediums plying their vocation in England, and for this
purpose enlisted the assistance of a professional conjurer, S. J. Davey,
who was also a member of the Society for Psychical Research.

Davey, after a little practice, succeeded in duplicating by mere sleight
of hand many of the most impressive feats of the mediums; doing this,
indeed, so well that some spiritists alleged that he was in reality a
medium himself. Hodgson, for his part, by clever analysis of the Davey
performances and of the feats of Davey's mediumistic competitors,
brought home to his colleagues in the Society for Psychical Research a
lively sense of the folly of depending on the human eye as a detector of
fraudulent spiritistic phenomena. His crowning triumph came with his
exposure of Eusapia Paladino, the Italian medium who is still enjoying
an undeserved popularity on the European continent.

But in time even Hodgson met his Waterloo. Sent to the United States to
investigate the trance phenomena of Mrs. Leonora Piper, he was forced to
confess that in her case the theory of fraud fell to the ground, and as
is well known he ended by developing into an out and out spiritist. A
few days before Christmas, 1905, he suddenly died in Boston; a