Kate Fox, Mrs. Jencken as she had become, the wife of a London barrister, was the mother of a baby whom popular talk credited with mediumistic powers of the most extraordinary kind. The whole Spiritistic following prophesied a brilliant future for the poor child, of whom, however, there is nothing recorded save that he was sadly neglected by his miserable mother, who died of chronic alcoholism in June, 1892. Mrs. Kane survived her sister for nine months, a pitiable and hopeless wreck, craving only for drink. The last few weeks of her life were spent in a derelict tenement house. “This wreck of womanhood has been a guest in palaces and courts. The powers of mind now imbecile were the wonder and the study of scientific men in America, Europe, and Australia.... The lips that utter little else now than profanity, once promulgated the doctrine of a new religion.”[102] It would, indeed, be difficult to conceive anything more sordid and more miserable than this sad and shocking story of utter degradation. The collapse and moral corruption of the first apostles of modern Spiritism should surely prove a timely warning and a danger signal not to be mistaken.[103] In the earliest days of Spiritism the subject was investigated by men like Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison, Robert Hare, professor of chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania, and John Worth Edmonds, a judge of the Supreme Court of New York State. Conspicuous among the spiritists we find Andrew Jackson Davis, whose work _The Principles of Nature_ (1847), dictated by him in trance, contained theories of the universe closely resembling those of the Swedenborgians. From America the movement filtered through to Europe, and when in 1852 two mediums, Mrs. Haydon and Mrs. Roberts, came to London, not merely popular interest but the careful attention of the leading scientists of the day was attracted. Robert Owen, the Socialist, frankly accepted the Spiritistic explanation of the various phenomena, while Professor De Morgan, the mathematician, in his account of a sitting with Mrs. Haydon declared himself convinced that “somebody or some spirit was reading his thoughts.” In the spring of 1855 Daniel Dunglas Home (Hume)—Home was the son of the eleventh Lord Home and a chambermaid at the Queen’s Hotel, Southampton, but was brought up in America—who was then a young man of twenty-two, crossed to England from America. In 1856 Home was received into the Church at Rome by Father John Etheridge, S.J., and he then gave a promise to refrain from all exercise of his mediumistic powers, but in less than a year he had broken his pledge and was living as before. This famous medium is almost the only one who, as even Podmore admits, was never clearly convicted of fraud. Sir David Brewster, the scientist, and Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, a scholar of unblemished integrity and one of the leading homœopathic physicians, both avowed that they were incapable of