I may mention that the investigations into the subject of telepathy, and kindred subjects, under the auspices of the society just mentioned, were conducted by men of careful scientific training and experience, and under the general supervision and approval of the officers of the society, among which have been numbered such eminent men as Prof.  Henry Sidgwick, of Cambridge University; Prof.  Balfour Stewart, a Fellow of the Royal Society of England; Rt.  Hon. A.J.  Balfour, the eminent English statesman; Prof.  William James, the eminent American psychologist; Sir William Crookes, the great chemist and discoverer of physical laws, who invented the celebrated “Crookes’ Tubes,” without which the discovery of the X Rays, radio-activity, etc., would have been impossible; Frederick W.H.  Myers, the celebrated explorer of the astral planes, and writer upon psychic phenomena; Sir Oliver Lodge, the popular English scientist; and other men of international reputation and high standing.  The character of these men at once gives the stamp of honesty and scientific accuracy to all the work of the society.

In order that you may understand the spirit which animated these scientific investigators in their work of the exploration of this new and strange region of Nature, I ask you to carefully read the following words of the presidential address of Sir William Crookes, before the Royal Society, at Bristol, England, in 1898.  Remember, please, that this address was made before an assemblage of distinguished scientists, many of them rank materialists and, quite skeptical of all occult phenomena—­this was nearly twenty years ago, remember.  Sir William Crookes, facing this gathering, as its president, said: 

“Were I now introducing for the first time these inquiries to the world of science, I should choose a starting point different from that of old (where we formerly began).  It would be well to begin with Telepathy; with that fundamental law, as I believe it to be, that thoughts and images may be transferred from one mind to another without the agency of the recognized organs of sense—­that knowledge may enter the human mind without being communicated in any hitherto known or recognized ways. * * * If telepathy takes place, we have two physical facts—­the physical change in the brain of A, the suggestor, and the analogous physical change in the brain of B, the recipient of the suggestion.  Between these two physical events there must exist a train of physical causes. * * * It is unscientific to call in the aid of mysterious agencies, when with every fresh advance in knowledge it is shown that either vibrations have powers and attributes abundantly able to any demand—­even the transmission of thought.

“It is supposed by some physiologists that the essential cells of nerves do not actually touch, but are separated by a narrow gap which widens in sleep while it narrows almost to extinction during mental activity.  This condition is so singularly like a Branly or Lodge coherer (a device which led to the discovery of wireless telegraphy) as to suggest a further analogy.  The structure of brain and nerve being similar, it is conceivable that there may be present masses of such nerve coherers in the brain, whose special function it may be to receive impulses brought from without, through the connecting sequence of ether waves of appropriate order of magnitude.