iv MODERN EVOLUTION 137 



(Lodge, Richet, Ochorowicz, and others) that 'on 

 no single occasion during the occurrence of an event 

 recorded by them was a hand of Eusapia's free to 

 execute any trick whatever.' Mr. Maskelyne, such 

 testimony notwithstanding, declared that the whole 

 business was ' the sorriest of trickeries,' and, to the 

 credit of the Society for Psychical Research, it 

 undertook the expense of bringing Eusapia to Eng- 

 land 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 

 subsequent explanatory letter to the Daily Chronicle 

 of 24th January 1896, expresses the opinion that 

 1 the Cambridge experiments, so far as they are 

 recorded, only prove that Eusapia might have 

 deceived, 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 ? Spirit- 

 ualism, if true, demonstrates this and that about the 

 unseen ; but spiritualism, proved to be untrue, lacks 

 half the dexterity of an astute conjuror, and the 

 whole of his honesty. Every scientific man 

 recognises the doctrine of the Conservation of 

 Energy as a fundamental canon. But with those 

 who regard the phenomena of Spiritualism as ' not 

 explicable' except by supernatural causes, it would 

 seem that that doctrine, as also the not unimportant 

 conditions of Time and Space, count for nothing. 



