But such professors as Richet, Ochorowicz, de Vesme, Flournoy, etc., and men like Flammarion, Carrington, Maxwell, etc., do believe that raps and other physical phenomena are produced by abnormal powers of the medium. They believe that when the medium sits in or before the cabinet, in proper conditions, the floor and table are rapped, the furniture is lifted or moved about, musical instruments are played, and impressions are made in plaster, although the medium has not done it with his or her hands or feet. As I said, these scientific men scorn the idea that "spirits" from another world play these pranks. They look for unknown natural forces in the medium. They _think_ that they have excluded fraud. We shall see. Meantime, the assent of so many scientific men to the phenomena themselves gives this class of experiences more plausibility than others. Most of these men base their opinion upon the remarkable doings of the Italian medium, Eusapia Palladino, and we shall therefore pay particular attention to her. But Spiritualists rely for these things on a very large number of mediums. In fact, some of our leading English Spiritualists do not believe in Palladino at all, having detected her in fraud. We must therefore first examine the evidence put before us by Spiritualists. We begin with the story of the Fox family in America in 1848, which admittedly inaugurated modern Spiritualism. Since Spiritualists commemorate, in 1920, the "seventy-second" anniversary of the foundation of their religion, I will surely not be accused of wasting time over trivial or irrelevant matters in going back to 1848. As, however, this is not a history, I must deal with this matter very briefly.