the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, held in 1884, a few members were invited by
one of the foreign visitors, Professor Fitzgerald of Dublin, I think,
to a conference on the subject of psychical research. The English
society on this subject had been organized a few years before, and the
question now was whether there was interest enough among us to lead
to the organization of an American Society for Psychical Research.
This was decided in the affirmative; the society was soon after
formed, with headquarters in Boston, and I was elected its first
president, a choice which Powell, of Washington, declared to be
ridiculous in the highest degree.

On accepting this position, my first duty was to make a careful study
of the publications of the parent society in England, with a view
of learning their discoveries. The result was far from hopeful.
I found that the phenomena brought out lacked that coherence
and definiteness which is characteristic of scientific truths.
Remarkable effects had been witnessed; but it was impossible to say,
Do so and so, and you will get such an effect. The best that could
be said was, perhaps you will get an effect, but more likely you
will not. I could not feel any assurance that the society, with
all its diligence, had done more than add to the mass of mistakes,
misapprehensions of fact, exaggerations, illusions, tricks, and
coincidences, of which human experience is full. In the course of a
year or two I delivered a presidential address, in which I pointed
out the difficulties of the case and the inconclusiveness of the
supposed facts gathered. I suggested further experimentation, and
called upon the English society to learn, by trials, whether the
mental influences which they had observed to pass from mind to mind
under specially arranged conditions, would still pass when a curtain
or a door separated the parties. Fifteen years have since elapsed,
and neither they nor any one else has settled this most elementary
of all the questions involved. The only conclusion seems to be that
only in exceptional cases does any effect pass at all; and when it
does, it is just as likely to be felt halfway round the world as
behind a curtain in the same room.

Shortly after the conference in Philadelphia I had a long wished-for
opportunity to witness and investigate what, from the descriptions,
was a wonder as great as anything recorded in the history of psychic
research or spiri