334 MY LIFE [Chap. 



"doubles," some of the most curious of which I have 

 made use of in my chapters on " Phantasms " in my book 

 on " Spiritualism." This one is especially valuable, as being 

 recorded by a gentleman who was remarkable for the great 

 care he gave to attain accuracy in all his work ; and it was 

 published under a well-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 

 appeared. 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, Mayfair. I think this was in 1878. I spent 

 several hours with him, discussing various aspects of spiritual- 

 istic phenomena. 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 stances 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 MSS. books full of notes of these stances 

 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 



