h some
distant event. The question is, Is the frequency of these latter cases
too great to be deemed fortuitous, and must we suppose an occult
connection between the two events? Mr. and Mrs. Sidgwick have worked
out this problem on the basis of the English returns, seventeen
thousand in number, with a care and thoroughness that leave nothing to
be desired. Their conclusion is that the cases where the apparition of
a person is seen on the day of his death are four hundred and forty
times too numerous to be ascribed to chance. The reasoning employed to
calculate this number is simple enough. If there be only a fortuitous
connection between the death of an individual and the occurrence of his
apparition to some one at a distance, the death is no more likely to
fall on the same day as the apparition than it is to occur on the same
day with any other event in nature. But the chance-probability that
any individual's death will fall on any given day marked in advance by
some other event is just equal to the chance-probability that the
individual will die at all on any specified day; and the national
death-rate gives that probability as one in nineteen thousand. If,
then, when the death of a person coincides with an apparition of the
same person, the coincidence be merely fortuitous, it ought not to
occur oftener than once in nineteen thousand cases. As a matter of
fact, {313} however, it does occur (according to the census) once in
forty-three cases, a number (as aforesaid) four hundred and forty times
too great. The American census, of some seven thousand answers, gives
a remarkably similar result. Against this conclusion the only rational
answer that I can see is that the data are still too few; that the net
was not cast wide enough; and that we need, to get fair averages, far
more than twenty-four thousand answers to the census question. This
may, of course, be true, though it seems exceedingly unlikely; and in
our own twenty-four thousand answers veridical cases may possibly have
heaped themselves unduly.

The next topic worth mentioning in the Proceedings is the discussion of
the physical phenomena of mediumship (slate-writing, furniture-moving,
and so forth) by Mrs. Sidgwick, Mr. Hodgson, and 'Mr. Davey.' This, so
far as it goes, is destructive of the claims of all the mediums
examined. 'Mr. Davey' himself produced fraudulent slate-writing of the
highest order, while Mr. Hodgson, a 'sitter' in his confidence