We will consider the trickery of these people in detail later. This mere list of names, of more than national repute, gathered from one single periodical (the German _Psychische Studien_), shows how the mischievous readiness of Spiritualists to find excuses, and their equally mischievous readiness to admit "phenomena" where real control is impossible, make the movement as rich in impostors to-day as it was half a century ago. It must be understood that behind each of these leading mediums--men and women of international interest--are thousands of obscurer men and women who cheat less cultivated and less critical folk, and are never detected. It is therefore useless to divide mediums into professional and amateur, or into black, white, and grey. You take a very grave risk with every one of them. You need a close familiarity with all the varieties of fraud, and these we will now carefully examine. We will then consider more patiently and courteously what phenomena remain in the Spiritualist world which are reasonably free from the suspicion of fraud. FOOTNOTES: [1] _Les forces naturelles inconnues_ (1907), p. 18. [2] Same work, p. 213. [3] _Materialisations-phänomene_ (1914), pp. 22, 28, and 29. [4] _Personal Experiences in Spiritualism_ (1913), p. ix. [5] _Metapsychical Phenomena_ (1905), p. 46. CHAPTER II HOW GHOSTS ARE MADE The most thrilling expectation of every Spiritualist is to witness a materialization. The wild ghost, the ghost in a state of nature, the ghost which beckoned our grandmothers from their beds and waylaid our grandfathers when they passed the graveyard on dark nights, has become a mere legend. Hardly fifty years ago authentic ghost stories were as common as blackberries. But the growth of education and the establishment of exact inquiry into such matters have relegated all these stories to the realm of imagination. According to the Spiritualist, however, we have merely replaced the wild ghost by the tame ghost, the domesticated ghost of the séance room. The clever spirits of the other world, who could not when they were alive on earth detach a single particle from a living body (except with a knife), are now able to take a vast amount of material out of the medium's body and build it up in the space of quarter or half an hour into a hand, a face, or even a complete human body. This is the great feat of materialization.