C. W. Hill, giving the whole time of a tedious captivity to evolving

tricks of the business, successfully fooled a hundred of their fellow-officer prisoners, men of intelligence and education, into belief in telepathy. In the appendix of their book there is given a portion of their telepathy code to show the sort of system which may be worked, a code which allowed the communication of the names of hundreds of common articles, numbers, the names of all the officers in the camp, etc. They could use the code with, or without speaking; perfection in its use, the authors say, involved a good deal of memory work and constant practice. 'Nothing but the blankness of our days, and the necessity of keeping our minds from rusting could have excused the waste of time entailed by preparation for a thought-reading exhibition. It is hardly a fitting occupation for free men.' What these officers could do obviously the professional conjurer can do, no less the humbug and quack who swindles money out of the credulous and superstitious. Let no one give credence to telepathy till he or she has read this most amusing and educative book. The authors no less humbugged the camp by planchette writing whereby they transmitted messages supposed to come from disembodied spirits. They fooled not only their fellow-prisoners with these spirit messages, but the Turkish interpreter and Commandant of the camp, gaining thereby important concessions. They planned a daring method of escape which depended on exciting the cupidity of the Commandant and on a hunt for buried treasure, occupying many months of preparation, and only failing at the last through the unwitting interference of a brother officer. Some of their 'spirit' messages were actually transmitted through the Commandant to the War Office in Constantinople, so implicit became his obedience. What these two officers affected is unequalled by anything in Sir Oliver Lodge's evidence as set forth in _Raymond_. They give details of how they used chance remarks and trivial facts heard and memorised months beforehand, and of how they observed and were guided by the slightest variation in tone of answer or movement of their victims, which expressed interest and excitement or the reverse, and so built up a story of some past action which clinched belief. The hits were striking and memorised, and the misses unnoticed, forgotten--for such is the tendency of the human mind. Such are the methods of the professional medium, and in _The Road to Endor_ they lie unravelled and fully exposed. The physiologist recognises the tendency of those with unstable, nervous temperaments--e.g. hysterical girls--to gain interest and cause excitement at any cost of trouble in developing methods of deceit. Hence the ghostly visitations of houses, the mysterious bell-ringings, rappings, spillings of water, etc. I, myself, have personally come across and investigated two of these cases--one of a young, educated woman who played pranks on the house of her hosts, pouring water into their beds, etc.; the other of a servant-maid who caused the disappearance of meat from the larder, and dirtying the cat's feet made it make foot-marks on a perpendicular wall leading to the larder window, who spirited away the gardener's firewood and wrote mysterious letters in a feigned hand, the imprint of which were found in her blotting-book, and who reported she saw a mysterious woman prowling round the house. The few eminent scientists who have expressed their belief in spiritualism are mostly physicists, e.g. Crookes, Oliver Lodge and W. Barrett--men who have not made a life-study of physiology and nervous disorders, who are not familiar with the attainments and methods of conjurers and professional impostors, and are shielded in their laboratories and home life from close acquaintance with human deceit and cunning. Their familiarity with the transmission of waves of energy in dead material, and through space leads them to concepts which cannot justly be applied to living beings. To the physiologist, who recognises the majestic unity of natural phenomena, belief in telepathy and spiritualism appear a form of materialism as gross as the ju-ju superstition of the Benin native. Nothing can excite greater contempt than the mean trivialities which are served as communications from that infinite, silent universe wherein the energy of individual life sinks on death. The belief in spiritualism works grave harm on ignorant, credulous people of nervous temperament, and fills the pockets of rascally impostors. Its practice should then be as sternly suppressed by the law as any other fraud and imposture. Dr. Culpin, in his valuable and thoughtful treatment of this subject, shows, _inter alia_, how the medium requires no less to be protected from deception and ruin of his own soul than does his dupe. SPIRITUALISM AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY