It may be conceded at once that neither Mr. Wedgwood nor either of the ladies with whom he wrote had any conscious knowledge of Col. Gurwood--his military career, or his sad taking off; but they were all intelligent people. John Gurwood, as it turned out, was a noted man; he was an officer in the Peninsular War, under the Duke of Wellington, performed an act of special bravery and daring, in the performance of which he was severely wounded, and for which he was afterward granted a coat of arms. He was also afterward chosen to edit the duke's dispatches. All this was recorded in the _Annual Register_ for 1845, soon after Gurwood's death, together with a description in the language of heraldry of the crest or coat of arms which had been granted him many years before. It is scarcely possible that such an event would not have been noticed in the newspapers at the time of Gurwood's death, and nothing is more probable than that some of these intelligent persons had read these accounts, or as children heard them read or referred to, though they may now have been entirely absent from their ordinary consciousness and memory. At all events, the subliminal self or secondary consciousness of Mrs. R., whom Planchette designates as "the medium," or of Mr. Wedgwood, may have come into relationship with the sources of information necessary to furnish the messages which it communicated, and these sources may have been the knowledge or impressions unconsciously received many years before by some of those present, the generally diffused knowledge of these facts which doubtless prevailed in the community at the time of Gurwood's death, and the full printed accounts of these events, many copies of which were extant. From the description of Gurwood's coat of arms the idea could easily have been obtained which Planchette rudely represented in drawing, constituting what is called a test, and also the other knowledge concerning his military career and death which appeared in the various messages. Regarding cases coming under my own observation, the incident relating to Peter Stuyvesant's pear tree was well known to us both, and had only recently been a matter of general conversation, and all of those present had a more or less distinct idea of Peter Stuyvesant himself, derived from Irving's "Knickerbocker's History of New York." Of the cases observed with Miss V., as before stated, nearly all the names given of "authorities," as we called them, were evidently fictitious, scarcely one being recognized, and none were of persons with whom we had any connection, and some did not claim any other origin than our subliminal consciousness, as was also the case with messages written by Mrs. Newnham.