ispassionate students rest their case on an unexpectedly small
body of undiscredited evidence. Mrs. Piper, Home and Stainton Moses are
the mediums with whom the case of the S.P.R. really stands or falls.
Home was never detected in fraud and was non-professional. Sir William
Crookes' experiments in these physical phenomena were carried on with
him as medium. His work, however, was generally done for a small group
of already convinced followers and their testimony, while sincere and
generally consistent, may often have been influenced in ways of which
they themselves were not conscious. Podmore thinks them to have been
unduly suggestible and offers hallucinations as an alternative
hypothesis. Stainton Moses was respected in his private life, a teacher,
a clergyman and a private tutor. His specialties were the introduction
of a great variety of articles--apports as they are called--at his
sittings, levitation, table-tipping and automatic writing and the direct
voice. His control was known as "Imperator" and this ghostly commander
fills a large place in the S.P.R. literature. "Imperator" had a strong
homiletic instinct (remember that Moses was a clergyman) and
communicated first and last through automatic writing, a considerable
exposition of the spiritualistic creed, the larger part of which could
have been preached from any liberal pulpit with no other effect on the
hearers than to win their assent to blameless commonplaces--or,
possibly, put them to sleep.

Mrs. Piper affords the strongest evidence of what Podmore calls "Some
supernormal power of apprehension" in the entire history of trance
mediumship. She was for years under the constant observation of a
capable group by no means unanimously sympathetic with the spiritistic
hypothesis, and has never been detected in fraud. She contributed a very
great amount of information to her sitters which she apparently could
not and did not obtain from known sources. There are no physical
phenomena in connection with her work. The records of her seances fill a
large place in the proceedings of the S.P.R. and the case for spiritism
could be more safely rested with her than any other medium.

But the point here is that these three--Home, Moses and Mrs.
Piper--supply the larger part of material which the really trained
investigators of the last forty years are at all willing to take
seriously. If there have been only three mediums in forty years who have
commanded the general confi