therefore gave to the book he wrote on the subject, the title, “Subconscious Mental Life.” I am aware that the theory he upheld is now much contested, that there are those who, while they do not dispute the genuineness of the manifestations, would ascribe them to quite another cause, looking upon them as of purely objective nature, and entirely independent of the medium. Time alone can decide which of these two schools of psychical research is the better justified. Then, at all events, it had not yet occurred to any of us to seek the explanation of these phenomena from without, everything appearing sufficiently to demonstrate their origin in our own mentality; a belief which did not, however, in the least preclude our full recognition of the superiority of the results achieved, to all similar performances by the same individual in the normal state. Our experiments were now no longer confined to mere spirit-rapping or observations made on subjects during the mesmeric trance; they were henceforth specially directed to psychography, and with the most gratifying results. It was perhaps the manifestations in this higher sphere which overcame the last barriers of my father’s incredulity; the simple manner in which they were obtained, by means of a pencil, passed through a large woollen ball, on which two persons placed their hands, absolutely preventing any possibility of fraud. Very often he made the experiment himself, together with one other person, generally a young girl whose store of magnetism was known to be above the average, and he was able thus to convince himself that the movements of the pencil, tracing characters with lightning rapidity in its course across the paper, were entirely independent of human agency.