Here, again, a misunderstanding arises in consequence of different names being applied to what may prove to be one and the same imponderable compound. Because electricity did not become a science till the eighteenth century, no one will presume to say that this force has not existed since the creation; moreover, we are prepared to prove that even the ancient Hebrews were acquainted with it. But, merely because exact science did not happen before 1819 to stumble over the discovery which showed the intimate connection existing between magnetism and electricity, it does not at all prevent these two agents being identical. If a bar of iron can be endowed with magnetic properties, by passing a current of voltaic electricity over some conductor placed in a certain way close to the bar, why not accept, as a provisional theory, that a medium may also be a _conductor_, and nothing more, at a seance? Is it unscientific to say that the intelligence of “psychic force,” drawing currents of electricity from the waves of the ether, and employing the medium as a conductor, develops and calls into action the latent magnetism with which the atmosphere of the seance-room is saturated, so as to produce the desired effects? The word _magnetism_ is as appropriate as any other, until science gives us something more than a merely hypothetical agent endowed with conjectural properties. “The difference between the advocates of psychic force and the spiritualists consists in this,” says Sergeant Cox, “that we contend that there is as yet insufficient proof of any other directing agent than the intelligence of the medium, and _no proof whatever_ of the agency of the ‘spirits’ of the dead.”[333] We fully agree with Mr. Cox as to the lack of proof that the agency {202} is that of the spirits of the dead; as for the rest, it is a very extraordinary deduction from “a wealth of facts,” according to the expression of Mr. Crookes, who remarks further, “On going over my notes, I find ... such a superabundance of evidence, so overwhelming a mass of testimony ... that I could fill several numbers of the _Quarterly_.”[334]