‘mysterious agencies’) ’what is quite inexplicable by ordinary mechanical means,’ while, according to the policeman, she was not even present on some occasions.  But it is not easy to make out, in the evidence of White, the other witness, whether this girl Rose was present or not when the jar flew circuitously out of the cupboard, a thing easily worked by a half-witted girl.  Such discrepancies are common in all evidence to the most ordinary events.  In any case a half-witted girl, in Mr. Podmore’s theory, can do what ’is quite inexplicable by ordinary mechanical means.’  There is not the shadow of evidence that the girl Rose had the inestimable advantage of being ‘half-witted;’ she is described by Mr. Podmore as ’the child of an imbecile mother.’  The phenomena began, in an isolated case (the tilted table), before Rose entered the house.  She was admitted in kindness, acted as a maid, and her interest was not to break the crockery and upset furniture.  The troubles, which began before the girl’s arrival, were apparently active when she was not present, and, if she was present, she could not have caused them ‘by ordinary mechanical means,’ while of extraordinary mechanical means there was confessedly no trace.  The disturbances ceased after she was dismissed—­nothing else connects her with them.

Mr. Podmore’s attempt at a normal explanation by fraud, therefore, is of no weight.  He has to exaggerate the value, as disproof, of such discrepancies as occur in all human evidence on all subjects.  He has to lay stress on the interval of five weeks between the events and the collection of testimony by himself.  But contemporary accounts appeared in the local newspapers, and he does not compare the contemporary with the later evidence, as we have done.  There is one discrepancy which looks as if a witness, not here cited, came to think he had seen what he heard talked about.  Finally, after abandoning the idea that mechanical means can possibly have produced the effect, Mr. Podmore falls back on the cunning of a half-witted girl whom nothing shows to have been half-witted.  The alternative is that the girl was ‘the instrument of mysterious agencies.’

So much for the hypothesis of a fraud, which has been identical in results from China to Peru and from Greenland to the Cape.

We now turn to the other, and concomitantly active cause, in Mr. Podmore’s theory, hallucination.  ’Many of the witnesses described the articles as moving slowly through the air, or exhibiting some peculiarity of flight.’  (See e.g. the Worksop case.) Mr. Podmore adds another English case, presently to be noted, and a German one.  ’In default of any experimental evidence’ (how about Mr. William Crookes’s?) ’that disturbances of this kind are ever due to abnormal agency, I am disposed to explain the appearance of moving slowly or flying as a sensory illusion, conditioned by the excited state of the percipient.’ (’Studies,’ 157, 158.)