Slate writing was an especially fortunate “find” for mediums. Its results were obtained in full light and the whole thing seemed so simple and direct that apparently there was nothing to investigate and comparatively speaking there were no blank seances. Such success led to carelessness and exposures followed, so numerous and complete that it is quite unnecessary to list them all here.[68] Every once in a while though some medium still takes a chance when opportunity offers and gives a test to especially gullible sitters, but to-day no medium with any pretentions to “class” would think of anything so “common” as slate writing in its old form. Spirit slates are now listed in the catalogues of houses dealing in conjuring apparatus and the fraud mediums who formerly made use of them are employing the safer and easier swindles of automatic writing, trance or trumpet messages, and the “ouija board.” The infinite grafting possibilities of the Spirit slates seem to have been overlooked until adopted and put into usable form by Dr. Henry Slade,[69] a man who had acquired an unenviable reputation in New York City, but it is extremely doubtful if the present generation would have known anything about Dr. Slade had the perpetuation of his name been left to the quality of his mediumship, for he was only one of a large number of conjuring fakirs who bamboozled the credulous of his day. However, he was brought into the limelight on two notable occasions: first by being exposed and criminally prosecuted in London; and second when poor old Professor Zollner, a noted German astronomer and physicist, “fell” for his simple conjuring and fell so hard that he made Slade the hero of his great (?) work, “Transcendental Physics.” Like D. D. Home, and many others, after making a reputation in America, Slade jumped over to London, for England’s arms seem ever open for the reception of mediums who have made good here and if a medium escapes the toils of American investigators he has little to fear from willing believers on the other side of the Atlantic, though as a matter of fact several were sent to jail there. Slade reached England in July, 1876, and began to hold sittings at once, and was soon “cleaning up” in fine shape. The late John Nevil Maskelyne, the great English magician, told me that: “Crowds of people rushed to witness the phenomena (?) paying one guinea each for a sitting lasting but a few minutes. You would think they were giving gold guineas away. The ‘Doctor’ must have netted some hundreds of pounds weekly which in those days was rated a high sum of money for an individual ‘performer.’”