We need not devote much time to the deliberate fraud and trickery which have always been admittedly associated with certain manifestations of mediumship and have frequently inspired such disgust and contempt in the minds of would-be investigators that they have abandoned the quest altogether. Those who have persevered in spite of discouragement know what it is to find oneself in uncomfortable and ill-ventilated rooms, holding the hands of unknown persons in the dark, tortured by the metallic music of a cheap gramophone, or compelled to join in discordant renderings of revivalist hymns or dreadful ditties like “Where is now the prophet Daniel?” And one realizes all the time that the music is meant to drown the noise caused by a fraudulent medium in wrapping himself in muslin or adjusting a false beard, and further that one will have to pay a guinea for this wretched exhibition! What researcher, again, has not experienced the boredom of public or private sittings for “delineations”, when a medium, after a few spasmodic twitchings, “passes under control” and proceeds to describe the appearance of the deceased relatives and friends of the members of a credulous audience, which will subsequently contribute to the “silver collection”? Who, too, has not reflected with amazement upon the staggering credulity of men and women who accept the delineated “old gentleman with white hair” or the “old lady with grey hair parted in the middle” as unquestionably their late father or mother; or, in a materializing _séance_, believe that the same piece of butter muslin waved in one direction is a lost grandparent and waved in another direction is a little child? Such wearisome and sordid experiences form the _via dolorosa_ of researchers, who are prepared to seek for gold even in the muddiest streams, and sometimes find it; for, even if ninety-five per cent. of the alleged phenomena are explicable by trickery or deception, the remaining five may defy all such explanations.