We must distinguish between such sportive playing with fire as prevailed recently in our isles and the more serious Fire Ceremony of Central Australia, which tests endurance on the one hand, and the apparent contravention of a natural law on the other. Again, we must discount the popular reply that the hand can be rapidly plunged into molten metal and withdrawn without injury, for we do not happen to be concerned with such a brief exposure to heat. Once more, the theory of the application of some unknown chemical substance must be rejected, because, as we shall prove, there are certainly cases in which nothing of the kind is done. Moreover, science is acquainted with no substance--alum or diluted sulphuric acid, or the like--which will produce the result of preventing cauterisation.[6] Sir William Crookes, at least, is not familiar with any such resources of science. His evidence as to fire-handling by D. D. Home is familiar, and I understand that Mr. Podmore can only explain it away by an hypothesis of a trick played in a bad light, by means of an asbestos glove or some such transparent trick.[7] Perhaps he adds a little 'hallucination' on the part of the spectators. But asbestos and hallucination are out of the question in the cases which I am about to quote. Home was, or feigned to be, in a state of trance when he performed with fire. The seeress of Lourdes, Bernadette, was also in religious contemplation when she permitted the flame of a candle to play through her clasped fingers (which were unscathed) for a timed quarter of an hour.[8] Some Indian devotees, again, aver that they 'meditate' on some divine being while passing over the glowing embers, and the Nistinares of Bulgaria, who dance in the fire, are described as being in a more or less abnormal mental condition. But even this condition is absent in the well-attested Raiatean and Fijian examples, in which also no kind of chemical preparation is employed. Finally, where savages are concerned, the hardness of the skins of their feet is dwelt upon, as in the Chinese case already quoted. But, first, the sole of the boot would be scorched in the circumstances, while their feet are not affected; next, the savages' feet were _not_ leathery (so Dr. Hocken avers); thirdly, one of the Europeans who walked through the fire at Rarotonga declares that the soles of his own feet are peculiarly tender. Thus every known physical or conjectured psychical condition of immunity fails to meet the case, and we are left wholly without an ascertained, or a good conjectural, 'reason why' for the phenomena.