MESMERISM TO SPIRITUALISM 351 



understood pseudonym, in a place where he had lived nearly 

 all his life. But what is especially remarkable is that the two 

 independent witnesses had no expectation of seeing the parties 

 where the phantasms appeared, while they themselves having 

 mistaken the hour the train was due could have had no special 

 anxiety as to being in time. And two of the persons seen being 

 children, the theory of the phantasms being caused by the three 

 " second selves " or " subliminal personalities," is very difficult 

 to conceive. 



Among the eminent men whose first acquaintance and 

 valued friendship I owe to our common interest in spiritualism 

 was F. W. H. Myers, whose great work on " Human Person- 

 ality and its Survival of Bodily Death " has so recently ap- 

 peared. I think I must have met him first at some seances in 

 London, and he asked me to call on him at his rooms in Bolton 

 Row, May fair. I think this was in 1878. I spent several hours 

 with him, discussing various aspects of spiritualistic phe- 

 nomena. He told me a great deal about the long series of 

 experiments with the celebrated Newcastle mediums, Miss 

 Wood and Miss Fairlamb, both under twenty, and whose 

 powers had been discovered only two years previously, who 

 were engaged for twelve months by Professor Sidgwick, Mr. 

 Gurney, and himself, for a long series of seances in New- 

 castle, in London (at Mr. Balfour's house in Carlton Gardens), 

 and in Cambridge at Professor Sidgwick's rooms. He showed 

 me several MS. books full of notes of these seances, of which 

 he was the reporter, and drew my attention to some which I 

 read through. In addition, he described to me the complete 

 tests which were applied in order to render it certain that the 

 phenomena were not produced by the mediums themselves. 

 For example, a curtain across the corner of a room formed the 

 cabinet. In this was placed a mattress and pillow on the bare 

 floor. The medium's wrists were tied securely with tapes, 

 leaving two ends a foot or more long. These ends were tacked 

 down to the floor, then covered with sealing-wax and sealed. 

 Under these conditions one or more forms came out from the 

 curtains, sometimes to a considerable distance and touched 



