Why was an astronomer chosen to give an account of the experiments at Genoa? Because astronomers are occupied with researches into the unknown.[40] If a man absorbed in his own private studies and attached to an austere and laborious manner of life, such as my venerated master M. Schiaparelli, has not hesitated to defy the irreverent jests of the comic journals, it behooves us to conclude that the bond between the science of the heavens and that of the human soul is more intimate than appears. The following is the most probable explanation. We have to do in these studies with phenomena which are manifested under wholly special and still undetermined conditions, in conformity with laws almost unknown and, in any case, of such a character that the will of the experimenter has but little influence upon the unshackled, self-regulating, and often adverse volitions which betray themselves at every moment in the study of these psychical marvels. Nobody is better prepared to study these things than an astronomer, possessing, as he does, a scientific education precisely adapting him to the investigation of such conditions. In fact, by the systematic observation of the movements of the heavenly bodies, the astronomer contracts the habit of being a vigilant and patient spectator of phenomena, without attempting either to arrest or to accelerate their irresistible development. In other words, the study of the stars belongs to the science of _observation_ rather than to that of _experiment_. Professor Porro then sets forth the actual state of the question relating to mediumistic phenomena. The explanation that everything is fraud, conscious or unconscious [says he], is to-day almost entirely abandoned, as much so as that which supposes that all is hallucination. In fact, neither one nor the other of these hypotheses is sufficient to throw light upon the observed facts. The hypothesis of unconscious automatic action on the part of the medium has not obtained any better fate; for the most rigorous controls have only proved that the medium finds it impossible to excite a direct dynamic effect. Physio-psychology has therefore been obliged, in these latter years, to have recourse to a supreme hypothesis, by accepting the theories of M. de Rochas, against which they had heretofore directed the fire of their heaviest guns. It has become resigned to the admission that a medium whose limbs are held motionless by a rigorous control may, under certain conditions, project outside of herself, to a distance of several yards, a force sufficient to produce certain phenomena of movement in inanimate bodies.