One need hardly point out that, although a medium who merely trusts to luck will probably score a good proportion of “hits” by ringing the changes on a few common types of face, he can greatly increase this proportion by a little adroit “pumping” of the sitter which will give him a guide to at least the general type of face expected, thus enabling him to “deliver the goods,” at any rate approximately, at the next _séance_. It should also be remembered that in everyday life recognition is a much more sketchy affair than might at first be suspected. Experiments have shown that in reading, or in viewing a drawing, we do not take cognizance of each individual element; on the contrary our attention flits, so to speak, from point to point, skipping altogether the intervening matter. We thus obtain an outline or skeleton impression which we fill up from our own resources. We actually notice a few salient features and interpolate the rest; hence, for example, the well-known difficulty of “spotting” mis-prints in proofs. This process is perfectly satisfactory for ordinary purposes such as reading, and seldom results in our misinterpreting the symbols before us, and when it does the context usually puts us right. But in dealing with spirit photographs the context, if there can properly be said to be any, is much more likely to put us wrong. The “salient features” which “leap to the eyes” are, in this case, those which suffice to locate a face as belonging to a certain general type, while the details which we fill up for ourselves are just those which are necessary for the identification of a particular individual. Consequently, false recognition is easy provided the general type is all right. The “beauty” is emphatically “in the eye of the beholder.” As “M.A. (Oxon),” a famous spiritualist and a believer in spirit photographs, well said: “Some people would recognise anything. A broom and a sheet are quite enough to make up a grandmother for some wild enthusiasts who go with the figure in their eye and see what they wish to see.... I have had pictures that might be anything in this or any other world sent to me, and gravely claimed as recognised portraits; palpable old women authenticated as ‘my spirit brother, dead seventeen years, as he would have been if he had ...’ etc.”