Phenomena not unlike the “exuberant” table activities at Mariemont, as described in “Raymond,” were familiar over half a century ago to the sitters with Mrs. Hayden. Mrs. De Morgan tells of a case in which the watchers were directed by raps to join hands and stand up round the table without touching it. They stood patiently for a quarter of an hour, and just as one or two of the party talked of sitting down, the old table “moved entirely by itself as we surrounded and followed it with our hands joined, went towards the gentleman out of the circle, and literally pushed him up to the back of the sofa, till he called out ‘Hold, enough!’” Robert Chambers, who was a close examiner of the table phenomena of his day, formed an opinion which would be accepted, as we shall show, by thoughtful writers of our own time who are on other grounds believers in Spiritualism. “I am satisfied,” Robert Chambers wrote in _Chambers’s Journal_, “that the phenomena are natural, but to take them in I think we shall have to widen somewhat our ideas of the extent and character of what is natural.” In 1853 a committee of British medical men held an investigation on table-turning. They decided that the table-motion was due to muscular action, mostly exercised unconsciously. Faraday, as Mr. Podmore shows in “Modern Spiritualism,” was able to prove that the table movements were due to muscular action, exercised in most cases without the consciousness or volition of the sitters. Table-turning, in the remoter towns and villages of Europe, was a favourite drawing-room amusement as late as 1876. II Sir Oliver Lodge, in his deeply interesting address to the Dublin section of the Society for Psychical Research,[19] delivered more than ten years ago, spoke wise words on the physical phenomena of the séance. “There is but little doubt in my mind,” he says, “that such movements do take place; I have had personal experience of them. Nevertheless they are not yet really established as facts, and if they were there would still be a question whether these movements are due to some independent intelligent agency, or whether, as is most likely, they are an extension of the ordinary power of the organism through which they are produced.”