If all serious discussion be impossible with certain savants, it is not so with those who have taken the trouble to verify psychic phenomena for themselves. This is the case with the principal members of the Society for Psychical Research, Crookes, Lodge, Barrett, Myers, Sidgwick, Gurney, Podmore, Hodgson, Hyslop, and others. The first three are persuaded of the reality of the facts observed by them. The others have a tendency to attribute to fraud all _physical_ phenomena; they admit, on the other hand, _intellectual_ phenomena, and explain them either by telepathy as Mr. Podmore does, or by the intervention of spirits as spiritists themselves do, though they were at one time the latter’s adversaries; this is notably the case with Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop. The great respect I have for the remarkable men who direct the Society for Psychical Research, obliges me to examine their experiments very carefully, for their judgment has a great value in my eyes; at the same time, I have too much regard for the research of truth to conceal from them the errors of experimentation, which they appear to me to have committed. In the fourth volume of the _Proceedings_ will be found a series of papers by Mrs. Sidgwick, Messrs. Lewis, Hodgson, and Davey upon fraud. The last-named deal particularly with the production of direct slate-writing. This phenomenon is very easy to simulate; it suffices to read the papers mentioned, especially Davey’s document, to understand under what suspicious conditions the phenomenon was produced. A long time ago I myself artificially produced this kind of manifestation by fixing a pencil into a hole in the table, and thereupon moving the slate about. With practice a certain amount of facility can be acquired; you can write fairly well and give regularity to apparently spasmodic and involuntary movements; but only inexperienced or credulous people are taken in by this trick; and though they may be more complicated, Mr. Davey’s methods are not by any means more difficult to expose. I wonder how a man of Dr. Hodgson’s intelligence could have based his judgment upon such superficial observations as those of the experimenters he cites. Here are men, without doubt honourable and well educated, who hold seances with the object of obtaining direct slate-writing through Mr. Davey. Instead of taking the elementary precaution of never abandoning their slates, they allow the medium to manipulate them, permit him to leave the seance-room for a moment, consent to allow other slates than their own to remain on the table at the same time as those which are used for the experiment, and lastly when they examine, only examine it on one side. This is not mal-observation, it is absence of observation. (See R. Hodgson, ‘Mr. Davey’s Imitations by Conjuring of Phenomena sometimes attributed to Spirit Agency,’ _Proceedings_, vi. 253.)