It may be interesting, in concluding this brief examination into one branch of the great subject of "Spiritualism," to bring together a few of the impressions produced on the minds of some of the leading investigators. It should not be forgotten that the branch of the subject which we have been studying may be looked upon as representing the lowest steps only of a great staircase which ascends, until, to our gaze, it is lost in unknown infinite heights. It is only the foot of a ladder, to use another simile, resting on the material earth, which we have been considering; at most the two or three lowest rungs. But to the eyes of some, even now and here, glimpses of angels ascending and descending are visible. Five names stand out prominently before all others among the earlier investigators of the last thirty years--Sir William Crookes and Professor W. F. Barrett, who are still with us; and Professor Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers, who have gone. Sir William Crookes' work in other directions has been all-absorbing, so that all he has been able to tell us during the last few years, in relation to our present subject, is that he had nothing to add to, and nothing to retract from what he has said in the past. In his address as President of the British Association in 1898, Sir William Crookes said, after referring to his work of thirty years ago:-- "I think I see a little further now. I have glimpses of something like coherence among the strange elusive phenomena, of something like continuity between those unexplained forces, and laws already known.... Were I now introducing for the first time these inquiries to the world of science, I should choose a starting-point different from that of old. It would be well to begin with Telepathy; with the fundamental law, as I believe it to be, that thoughts and images may be transferred from one mind to another without the agency of the recognised organs of sense--that knowledge may enter the human mind without being communicated in any hitherto known or recognised ways."[72]