When I first received a communication myself I was particularly careful to avoid giving any indication, by going with steady regularity over the letters; yet there was spelt out correctly, first, the place where my brother died, Para; then his Christian name, Herbert; and lastly, at my request, the name of the mutual friend who last saw him, Henry Walter Bates. On this occasion our party of six visited Mrs. Marshall for the first time, and my name as well as those of the rest of the party, except one, were unknown to her. That one was my married sister, whose name was no clue to mine.
On the same occasion a young lady, a connection of Mr. R.'s was told that a communication was to be made to her. She took the alphabet, and instead of pointing to the letters one by one, she moved the pencil smoothly over the lines with the greatest steadiness. I watched her, and wrote down the letters which the taps indicated. The name produced was an extraordinary one, the letters being Thomas Doe Thacker. I thought there must be an error in the latter part; but the names were Thomas Doe Thacker, the lady's father, every letter being correct. A number of other names, places, and dates were spelt out on this occasion with equal accuracy; but I give only these two, because in these I am sure no clue was given by which the names could have been guessed by the most preternaturally acute intellect.
On another occasion, I accompanied my sister and a lady who had never been there before to Mrs. Marshall's, and we had a very curious illustration of the absurdity of imputing the spelling of names to the receiver's hesitation and the medium's acuteness. She wished the name of a particular deceased relative to be spelled out to her, and pointed to the letters of the alphabet in the usual way, while I wrote down those indicated. The first three letters were y r n. "Oh!" said she, "that's nonsense; we had better begin again." Just then an e came, and, thinking I saw what it was, I said, "Please go on, I understand it." The whole was then spelt out thus: yrnehkcocffej. The lady even then did not see it, till I separated it thus: yrneh kcocffej, or Henry Jeffcock,—the name of the relative she had wanted, accurately spelt backwards.
Another phenomenon, necessitating the exertion both of force and intellect, is the following: The table having been previously examined, a sheet of note paper was marked privately by me, and placed with a lead-pencil under the centre foot of the table, all present having their hands upon the table. After a few minutes, taps are heard, and, on taking up the paper, I find written on it, in a free hand, "William." On another occasion, a friend from the country—a total stranger to the medium, and whose name was never mentioned—accompanied me; and, after receiving what purported to be a communication from his son, a paper was put under the table, and in a few minutes there was found written on it "Charley T. Dodd." the correct name. In these cases it is certain there was no machinery under the table; and it simply remains to ask if it were possible for Mrs. Marshall to slip off her boots, seize the pencil and paper with her toes, and write on it a name she had to guess at, and again put on her boots without removing her hands from the table, or giving any indication whatever of her exertions.
It was in November, 1866, that my sister discovered that a lady living with her had the power of inducing loud and distinct taps and other curious phenomena; and I now began a series of observations in my own house, the most important of which I shall briefly narrate.
When we sat at a large loo table without a cloth, with all our hands upon it, the taps would generally commence in a few minutes. They sound as if made on the under side of the leaf of the table, in various parts of it. They change in tone and loudness, from a sound like that produced by tapping with a needle or a long finger-nail, to others like blows with a fist or slaps with the fingers of a hand. Sounds are produced also like scraping with a finger-nail, or like the rubbing of a damp finger pressed very hard on the table. The rapidity with which these sounds are produced and are changed is very remarkable. They will imitate, more or less exactly, sounds which we make with our fingers above the table; they will keep good time to a tune whistled by one of the party; they will sometimes, at request, play a very fair tune themselves, or will follow accurately a hand tapping a tune upon the table.
Of course, the first impression is that some one's foot is lifting up the table. To answer this objection, I prepared the table before our second trial without telling any one, by stretching some thin tissue paper between the feet an inch or two from the bottom of the pillar, in such a manner that any attempt to insert the foot must crush or tear the paper. The table rose up as before, resisted pressure downwards, as if it was resting on the back of some animal, sunk to the floor, and in a short time rose again, and then dropped suddenly down. I now with some anxiety turned up the table, and, to the surprise of all present, showed them the delicate tissue stretched across altogether uninjured! Finding that this test was troublesome, as the paper or threads had to be renewed every time, and were liable to be broken accidentally before the experiment began, I constructed a cylinder of hoops and laths, covered with canvas. The table was placed within this as in a well, and, as it was about eighteen inches high, it kept the feet and dresses of the ladies away from the table. The latter rose without the least difficulty, the hands of all the group being held above it.
A small centre-table suddenly moved up of its own accord to the table by the side of the medium, as if it had gradually got within the sphere of a strong attractive force. Afterwards, at our request, it was thrown down on the floor without any person touching it, and it then moved about in a strange life-like manner, as if seeking some means of getting up again, turning its claws first on one side and then on the other. On another occasion, a very large leather arm-chair which stood at least four or five feet from the medium, suddenly wheeled up to her, after a few slight preliminary movements. It is, of course, easy to say that what I relate is impossible. I maintain that it is accurately true; and that no man, whatever be his attainments, has such an exhaustive knowledge of the powers of nature as to justify him in using the word "impossible" with regard to facts which I and many others have repeatedly witnessed.
We evidently have here facts similar to those which I observed in my experiments with Eusapia and with other mediums.
Alfred Russel Wallace continues his account by the citation of cases analogous to those which have been described in this work; then sums up the experiments of Crookes, of Varley, Morgan, and other English scientists; does me the honor of citing my letter to the Dialectical Society which I have printed above; passes in review the history of Spiritualism, and declares that (1) the facts are incontestable, and that (2), in his opinion, the best explanatory hypothesis is that of spirits, or the souls of the disembodied—the theory of "the unconscious" being evidently inadequate.