Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/48

 38 that "it continues to be the serious and complete conviction of all of us, Lodge, Richet, Ochorowicz, and myself, that on no single occasion during the occurrence of an event recorded by us was a hand of Eusapia's free to execute any trick whatever."

Mr. Lang was so impressed by such evidence that he was "almost persuaded"; and although still seeking after a sign, said that it was not easy to see how believers or disbelievers could ever find a "positive test." The eager Spectator indulged in "high falutin'" talk on this triumph of psychical research, and admonished scientific men that at their peril did they stand aloof, or still insist that the thing " was a trick, a fraud, and nothing else." Well, since then, the Society has wisely given effect to Mr. Maskelyne's challenge to produce Eusapia and submit her to that "positive test" which Mr. Lang thought it hard to apply. She was brought to Mr. Myers's house at Cambridge, and—I quote the fit and homely phrase employed by Mr. Lang—"busted up." Her dodge was the common one of preventing her dupes from suspecting that one of her hands was doing duty for two^ and of getting the immediate sitters on either side of her to so place their feet that with the toe and heel of one of her feet she could make them believe that they each felt separate feet. By this dodge one hand and one foot were left free to work the oracle.

That an illiterate, but astute, Neapolitan conjurer should have thus befooled men of high intellectual capacity justifies my strictures on the incompetence of scientific specialists off their own beat to detect common trickery. And of course that incompetence is greater where there is a bias in favour of occult phenomena. Such people, as Mr. Maskelyne observes, "can be brought to believe anything that