likeness of his still-living--and much annoyed--father-in-law. Buguet was convicted and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment and a fine of 100 francs. It was maintained by spiritualists in England that he had been bribed to make a false confession; and after the expiry of his sentence he appears to have told the same tale. This, however, quite fails to explain the finds made at his studio by the French police. At the time of Buguet’s trial, another spirit photographer, Parkes by name, was practising in London. He never produced photographs of any value, as he gave but little opportunity of watching his proceedings in the dark-room; nor were many of his extras recognised. Nevertheless there are certain points of interest in his career. Some of his plates showed evident marks of double exposure; he was adroit enough to write articles to the spiritualistic papers, drawing attention to this fact and suggesting theories to account for it. It had been previously assumed by spiritualists that the spirit forms, although invisible to the eye, were present at the side of or behind the sitter, and that their images were projected on to the plate by refraction through the lens in the ordinary way. Hence their images on the plate would be inverted, like the image of the sitter. Parkes, however, described an experiment, which he professed to have carried out, throwing doubt on this. He placed, he said, a mirror obliquely across the camera between the lens and the plate, so as to project the image of the sitter and background on to a second plate at the side of the camera--the same principle employed in the viewing screen of the modern reflex camera. He said that the position of the spirit photograph was unaffected by the mirror, and that the extra still appeared on the plate at the back of the camera, while the sitter and background were naturally only photographed on the side plate. He further declared that the spirit was not affected by the lens, and appeared _erect_ on the back plate, instead of inverted as a normal photograph would be. The absurdity of this statement is evident when we realise that in his ordinary photographs sitter and spirit appeared the same way up--_i.e._, both inverted on the plate; in order to effect this and comply with his other statement, the spirits would have to be standing on their heads beside the sitters! Now Parkes also professed to have clairvoyant power, and claimed actually to _see_ the spirits standing with the sitters; as he never mentions them adopting the inverted attitude we may safely assume that they did not put themselves to this discomfort. One, at least, of Parkes’ statements must therefore have been false.