That was the state of the "new revelation" twenty years ago. Long before that whole volumes of quite precise description of ghost-land had been written, but it was discredited. Andrew Jackson Davis had invented the name "Summerland," which Sir A. C. Doyle adopts to-day; but Davis's wonderful gospel had turned out to be a farrago of wild speculation, founded on an imperfect grasp of a crude, early stage of science. Then Stainton Moses and hundreds of other automatic writers had given us knowledge about the next world. A common feature of these early descriptions was that the dead lived in a quasi-material universe round about the earth and could visit the various planets and the sun at any time. In that case, of course, they could give most valuable assistance to our astronomers, and they were quite willing. Some said that there were living beings on the sun. As a matter of fact, one of our early astronomers had conjectured that there might be a cool, dark surface below the shining clouds which give out the light of the sun, and this "spirit" was following his lead. We know to-day that no part of the sun falls below a temperature of 7,000° C. Others described life on Jupiter and Saturn, and we now know that they are red-hot. Another medium, Helen Smith, attracted to herself a most romantic interest for years because she was controlled by the spirit of a late inhabitant of the planet Mars, and we learned a marvellous amount of weird detail about life on Mars. The thing was so obviously overdone, and Spiritualism was so generally discredited in the eighties on account of the very numerous exposures of mediums, that for a time revelations were less frequent. People fell back very largely on the older belief, that the dead are "pure spirits," living in an environment that cannot be described in our language, which is material. This, in point of fact, is a hollow and insincere pretext. Philosophers have been accustomed for two thousand years to describe the life of the spirit, and have provided a vocabulary for any who are interested in it. The truth is that ideas were changing, and mediums were not at all sure what it was safe to say.