Let me truthfully record that many of the better educated Spiritualists fight shy of belief in this class of phenomena. They know that in the history of the movement every single "materializing medium" has sooner or later been convicted of fraud. They have, on reflection, seen that the formation, in the course of half an hour, of even a human hand--which is a marvellously compacted structure of millions of cells--would be a feat of stupendous power and intelligence. They feel that, if all the scientific men in the world cannot make a single living cell, it is rather absurd to think that these spirit workers, whose messages do not reflect a very high degree of intelligence, can make a human face out of the slime or raw material of the medium's body in half an hour, and put all the atoms back in their places in the medium's body in another half hour. The faith of the great majority of Spiritualists is, of course, heroic enough to overlook all these difficulties. Indeed, it is amazing to find even students of science among them indifferent to the enormous intrinsic improbability of a materialization. During the debate at the Queen's Hall Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had on the table before him a work which contained a hundred and fifty photographs of materializations. Several of these represented full-sized human busts (sometimes with the superfluous decoration of beards, spectacles, starched collars, ties, and tie-pins). One of them represented a full-sized human form, dressed in a bath robe. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a trained medical man, assured the audience that he believed that these were real forms, moulded out of the "ectoplasm" of the medium's body, in the space of less than half an hour, by spiritual powers! Sir William Crookes believed in materializations of a still more wonderful nature, as we shall see. Dr. Russel Wallace believed implicitly in materializations. Sir W. Barrett and Sir O. Lodge believe in materializations, since they believe in the honesty of D. D. Home, who professed to materialize hands. So we must not blame the ordinary Spiritualist if he knows nothing about the tremendous internal difficulties of this class of phenomena, and the consistent and appalling career of fraud of mediums in this respect. Materialization is the crowning triumph of the medium, the most convincing evidence of the new religion. It goes on to-day in darkened rooms in London--done by men who have already been convicted in London police-courts--and all parts of the world. Fraud follows fraud, yet the believer hopes (and pays) on. _Some_ of the phenomena are genuine, he says; that is to say, some of the tricks were not proved to be fraudulent. Let us see how these things are done.