This is a ponderous tome, taken up with a discussion of the phenomena of materialisation by the means of flashlight pictures of the medium taken during the progress of the phenomena which is given the rather high sounding name of “mediumistic teleplastics.” The reviewer confesses to rather a lack of interest in such works as this, especially as the author appears to have come to no definite conclusions, except perhaps the conclusion that he has been unable to explain the phenomena. On the well-known scientific principle of economy a complex hypothesis of materialisation is inacceptable if any other simpler hypothesis will explain the facts, and so long as the facts remain unexplained they can by hypothesis be just as well presumed to be due to trickery and fraud as to super-normal activities, and fraud has been so frequently established in like investigations that the suspicion of its existence must always be present until the true explanation is forthcoming.

White