the clairvoyant and other subjects who
will allow themselves to be experimented upon are few and far between;
and, secondly, work with them takes an immense amount of time, and has
had to be carried on at odd intervals by members engaged in other
pursuits. The Society has not yet been rich enough to control the
undivided services of skilled experimenters in this difficult field.
The loss of the lamented Edmund Gurney, who more than any one else had
leisure to devote, has been so far irreparable. But were there no
experimental work at all, and were the S. P. R. nothing but a
weather-bureau for catching sporadic apparitions, etc., in their
freshness, I am disposed to think its function indispensable in the
scientific organism. If any one of my readers, spurred by the thought
that so much smoke must needs betoken fire, has ever looked into the
existing literature of the supernatural for proof, he will know what I
mean. This literature is enormous, but it is practically worthless for
evidential purposes. Facts enough are cited, indeed; but the records
of them are so fallible and imperfect that at most they lead to the
opinion that it may be well to keep a window open upon that quarter in
one's mind.

In the S. P. R.'s Proceedings, on the contrary, a different law
prevails. Quality, and not mere quantity, is what has been mainly kept
in mind. The witnesses, where possible, have in every reported case
been cross-examined personally, the collateral facts {306} have been
looked up, and the story appears with its precise coefficient of
evidential worth stamped on it, so that all may know just what its
weight as proof may be. Outside of these Proceedings, I know of no
systematic attempt to _weigh_ the evidence for the supernatural. This
makes the value of the volumes already published unique; and I firmly
believe that as the years go on and the ground covered grows still
wider, the Proceedings will more and more tend to supersede all other
sources of information concerning phenomena traditionally deemed
occult. Collections of this sort are usually best appreciated by the
rising generation. The young anthropologists and psychologists who
will soon have full occupancy of the stage will feel how great a
scientific scandal it has been to leave a great mass of human
experience to take its chances between vague tradition and credulity on
the one hand and dogmatic denial at long range on the other, with no
body of persons e