Just one further detail of this sordid imposture. I said that on one occasion Marthe allowed the very title of the paper out of which she cut her portraits, _Le Miroir_, to appear in the photograph, and gave it a spiritual meaning. Now, that is Mme. Bisson's version. But Baron Schrenck's version is in flagrant contradiction, and an examination of the photographs proves that he is right. The words were caught, _accidentally_, by a camera placed in the cabinet, and the excuse was concocted the next day! Enough of these miserable "materializations." They are always dishonest. Every materializing medium has been found out. Almost since the birth of the movement there have been, and are to-day, hundreds of these men and women, paid and unpaid, who have masqueraded as ghosts, or duped their sitters in a dull red light with muslin and butter-cloth and phosphorized paper, with dolls and masks and stuffed gloves and stockings and rubber arms. If Spiritualists would persuade us that they are scrupulously honest, they must drive the last of these people out of their fold, and they must expunge every reference to these materializations from their literature. When we get such phenomena with a medium who has been searched by competent and independent witnesses, whose body-openings have been sealed and clothing changed, in a cabinet set up by independent inquirers, with _each_ hand and foot controlled by a separate man, or in a good light, we may begin to talk. Never yet has the faintest suggestion of a phenomenon been secured under such circumstances. FOOTNOTE: [6] I take this from the German psychic journal, _Psychische Studien_ Nov., 1909. CHAPTER III THE MYSTERY OF RAPS AND LEVITATIONS I now pass at once to a class of Spiritualistic manifestations which would be put forward by any well-educated occultist as the most authentic of all. Reference was made a few pages back to a large group of scientific and professional men who believe in what they call "mediumistic phenomena." They are not Spiritualists, and it is one of the questionable features of recent Spiritualist literature that they are often described as such. Thus the astronomers Flammarion and Schiaparelli are quoted. But Flammarion says repeatedly in his latest and most important book (_Les forces naturelles inconnues_, 1907) that he is not and never was a Spiritualist (see p. 581), and he includes a long letter from Schiaparelli, who disavows all belief even in the phenomena (p. 93). Professor Richet, who believes in materializations, is not a Spiritualist. Professor Morselli, who also accepts the facts, speaks of the Spiritualist interpretation of them as "childish, absurd, and immoral." The long lists of scientific supporters which the Spiritualists publish are in part careless or even dishonest.