MODERN EVOLUTION. 



149 



took the expense of bringing Eusapia to England 

 for the purpose of testing the genuineness of her 

 doings. She was taken to a house in Cambridge, 

 and detected as a vulgar impostor. Yet Mr. Wallace, 

 in the new edition of his Miracles and Modern Spirit- 

 ualism, describes all the phenomena occurring at 

 Professor Richet's house as " not explicable as the 

 result of any known physical causes," and, in a sub- 

 sequent explanatory letter to the Daily Chronicle 

 of 24th of January, 1896, expresses the opinion that 

 "the Cambridge experiments, so far as they are 

 recorded, only prove that Eusapia might have de- 

 ceived, not that she actually and consciously did so." 

 The integrity of Mr. Wallace is not to be doubted, 

 but what becomes of his competence to judge when 

 prejudice blinds itself to facts? Spiritualism, if true, 

 demonstrates this and that about the unseen; but 

 spiritualism, proved to be untrue, lacks half the dex- 

 terity of an astute conjurer, and the whole of his 

 honesty. Every scientific man recognises the doc- 

 trine of the Conservation of Energy as a fundamental 

 canon. But with those who regard the phenomena 

 of Spiritualism as " not explicable " except by super- 

 natural causes, it would seem that that doctrine, as 

 also the not unimportant conditions of Time and 

 Space, count for nothing. When we read their re- 

 ports of the behaviour of mediums who project (of 

 course, in the dark) " abnormal temporary prolonga- 

 tions " like pseudopodia, we should feel alike de- 

 pressed and confounded were there not abundant 



