The claims of the celebrated medium Mrs Thompson were carefully investigated by a competent observer, Mrs A. W. Verrall, the wife of an eminent Cambridge scholar, and herself of no mean scholastic attainments. I will endeavour to summarise Mrs Verrall's conclusions as follows:-- Mrs Verrall says that Mrs Thompson was unable to ascertain the correct statements of facts which have been grouped under the four following heads:-- (_a_) Things known to the sitter and directly present in his consciousness. (_b_) Things known to the sitter but not immediately present in his consciousness. (_c_) Things that have been well known to the sitter but are at the moment so far forgotten as only to be recalled by the statements of the medium. (_d_) Things unknown to the sitter. With regard to things under head (_a_) Mrs Verrall says: "Some very clearly marked instances have come within my own observation; the cases are not very numerous, but the response from the 'control' to what has been thought but not uttered by me has been so rapid and complete that, were it not for the evidence of the other sitter, I should have been disposed to believe that I had unconsciously uttered the thought aloud. "Thus, on one occasion, 'Nelly' said that a red-haired girl was in my house that day, and I was wondering whether a certain friend of my daughter's, who is often at the house, would be there, when 'Nelly' added: 'Not So-and-so,' mentioning by name my daughter's friend, exactly as though I had uttered the passing thought. Again, when 'Nelly' was describing a certain bag given to me for my birthday, something she said made me for a moment think of a small leather handbag left in my house by a cousin and occasionally used by me, and she said: 'You had an uncle that died; it was not long after that.' The father of the cousin whom I had just thought of is the only uncle I have known, but his death long preceded the giving to me of the bag as a birthday present, which was what she had quite correctly described till my momentary thought apparently distracted her attention to the other bag. I have had in all some five or six instances of such apparently direct responses as the above to a thought in the sitter's mind; but when at 'Nelly's' suggestion I have fixed my attention on some detail for the sake of helping her to get it, I have never succeeded in doing anything but what she calls 'muggling her.'" Another difficulty arises from the fact that mediums and their controls not infrequently receive impressions as pictures, and these pictures are liable to be misinterpreted. Mrs Verrall writes in her report of her sitting with Mrs Thompson: