January 16, 1907, the Myers control promised that it would, as a proof of its identity, cause Mrs. Holland and Mrs. Verrall to sign a piece of automatic writing with a triangle drawn within a circle. A circle with a triangle inside it actually appeared in Mrs. Verrall's script of January 28, while a script from Mrs. Holland exhibited several geometrical figures, including a circle with a triangle outside it. February 6 the same control said that it had just been referring, through Mrs. Verrall, to a "library matter," and investigation showed that half an hour earlier Mrs. Verrall, writing at her home in Cambridge, had begun a script in which the word "library" occurred three times--the only time during the period of the experiments that "library" was mentioned in her automatic writing or in Mrs. Piper's trance statements. The Myers control again, on February 11, announced that it had given "hope, star, and Browning" to Mrs. Verrall, and her script showed that this was correct. February 12 the Hodgson control declared it had been trying to impress the word "arrow" on Mrs. Verrall. Her script for the previous day, when received at the Society's offices in London, proved to be decorated with a drawing of three arrows. It is the multiplicity of coincidences like these--and I have given only the merest fragment of the evidence in hand--that has recently persuaded many hitherto hesitating psychical researchers, notably Sir Oliver Lodge, that scientific proof of spirit communication has veritably been obtained. For myself, I must frankly say, however, that I cannot accept this view of the case. Fraud, I admit, is out of the question as an explanatory hypothesis. Nor does it seem possible to explain away the evidence on the theory of mere chance, guessing, "lucky hits," etc. But there remains the hypothesis of telepathy between living minds; and, as it seems to me, there is nothing whatever in the evidence presented incompatible with the view that the cross-correspondences in question resulted from direct thought transference between the automatists themselves. CHAPTER V POLTERGEISTS AND MEDIUMS We have now to consider a very different class of spiritistic manifestations, the so-called "physical phenomena," which are historically among the earliest on record, and at the same time are far more spectacular and sensational than the phenomena produced by the automatic speakers and writers. They include such weird occurrences as the appearance in the séance room of ghostly forms alleged to be spirits "materialized" by the power of the medium; the lifting of the latter from the floor by an invisible force; the touching, pinching, and striking of the sitters by unseen hands, and the movement of small articles of furniture as though alive.