"Home then made some very curious experiments with flowers; he separated the scent into two portions, one odour smelling exactly like earth, the other being very sweet." And so a fresh lemon with its acid removed, "the flavour being a sort of mawkish alkali; some describing it as like magnesia, others as like washing soda".

Visiting, we will suppose, Mr. Moses' seances after these exploits, our demon would very easily have drawn the scent from the flowers, as described below.

The classification according to which the ideal demon is to sort them [the atoms] may be according to the essential character of the atom; for instance, all atoms of hydrogen to be let go to the left, erc.

This looks promising for that manufacture of liquid scents, pearls, and imitation gems which went on briskly at Dr. Speer's. Only our demon may be puzzled to get at his hydrogen, for instance, which he may not find lying about loose in a gentleman's study. Water and coal gas, however, he will probably find there; will these do?

The demon can decompose water or carbonic acid, first raising a portion of the compound to dissociational temperature, and then sending the oxygen atoms this way and the hydrogen or carbon that way.

He has really now, I think, gone through all that is necessary, and we need hardly trouble him to keep his little hands uncomfortably strained, in order to store up energy; unless, indeed, this be needed for a feat which he cannot well have practised in outlying space; namely, that triumph over the force of cohesion which is necessary to get a handbell through a party wall, or an orange through the keyhole.

In some such half-ironical fashion, as it seems to me, can we best deal at present with these mysteries of the constitution of matter, which are in reality as yet almost equally beyond the grasp of sage or of simpleton. I have shown that the things which Mr. Moses' guides are said to do are things of which great minds have loved to fancy the doing. I have shown that since in their view there was not a spirit to do them, they have found it necessary to invent one. "Whom therefore they ignorantly worship" - the being whom they conceive as moving at ease and naturally in a clearly seen molecular world - him do these records declare to them as the operative agency amid marvels which once again "contempt prior to examination" has led most of our best minds to neglect and ignore.

I shall not venture further in propria persona upon this dangerous ground. But I will quote here one of the answers of Mr. Moses' guides when appealed to on these points, that the reader may, at any rate, judge how far what they say is in accordance with speculations of which it is not likely that either they or their medium had ever heard. In fairness to them and to him I quote first (from Mr. Moses' note-books, see 943 A), one of their emphatic declarations that in his case all physical phenomena were absolutely subsidiary to the spiritual development which was their central aim:-

April 16th, 1876

No good end was to be got by lingering on the plane where everything is more or less vague and shifting; and where whatever truth may be gained is only an elementary enlightenment of material ignorance. It is not for you to deal with the plane of Physics; come upward to the realm of Spirit. For others it may be well to investigate the lines of contact between Matter and Spirit. It is not your work. Leave it. For others it may be well to develop the tentative attempts of spirit to project itself on the plane of matter. Leave it. It is not your work. Your organism is unfitted for it, and you could not attempt it without risk.

I will now quote a few words on the removal of scent from a flower:-

I want to ask how my flower came to be so dead?

"The odour was all drawn from it. Hence the perfumes that you had during the seance. The vital principle of the flower was gone. Hence it was dead; and the decay was owing to that fact. The principle was abstracted, even as the vital force is drawn from you".

Then was the strain on it mere decay?

"Yes, it withered and died because its spirit was gone; even as your earth body will wither and die when the spirit leaves it. You saw much of this before, when Odorifer scented flowers for you, and drew the perfume from them. It is not new. + Rector".

We have now considered both some apparently molar displacements of matter, and some that must needs have involved molecular rearrangement. And it will probably be admitted that even the coarser phenomena - movements of tables and the like - must have involved some molecular process to get the requisite .power from the medium's organism to operate at the new fulcrum. We have, therefore, a mixture of processes resembling the way in which we ourselves work with processes quite strange to us. It seems as though these might often be interchanged at pleasure; and there are passages which describe two cameos - one of them as having been actually cut and chipped in the seance-room by invisible hands, and the other as having been shaped directly by "will-power," with no carving process. A third way of effecting the same end is also mentioned; - that of suggesting the work to a mortal artist.

One of the most interesting of all modifications of matter presumably contained in the room consists in "direct writing," - the disposition of coloured matter in a form simulating the handwriting of some identified spirit. This phenomenon occurred at an early date in the experiences of Mr. Moses.

In such cases the content as well as the method of the writing is naturally important, in so far as it may throw light upon the identities concerned. There are here two separate questions. Firstly: Are the spirits who thus write directly the same as those who write through the medium's hand? Secondly: Are they the spirits who they profess to be? The first of these questions must, I think, be answered in the affir-mative. The direct signatures closely resemble the automatic signatures, and the two forms of writing are intimately intermixed. Sometimes, for instance, letters were formed under the shadow of Mr. Moses' hand, while he himself wrote as usual; or the letters were even formed under his gaze (when he was alone) in the light. The authors of the automatic script always claimed authorship of the direct script also.

But on the other hand, I do not see that the direct writing adds to the evidence for identity supplied by the automatic writing, except in so far as it shows that the claim to identity pervades every manifestation. Beings who can make pearls and carve cameos can presumably deposit chalk and arrange patterns thereof just as they choose, imitating any signature known to them with none of that special difficulty in the imitation of characteristics of handwriting which is felt on earth. Direct writing, in short, seems to be conditioned in much the same way as other phenomena by the mind of the medium.

The colouring matter used might either be apparently derived from some chalk pencil already in the room, or might have no obvious source.

And it may here be observed that, just as in the phenomena which looked the most crude and massive we seemed to discern on closer scrutiny an element of molecular guidance, so also even in phenomena on a physically small scale, like these directly-written signatures, we have constantly to face the question - Has matter been rearranged in the room itself? - e.g. disaggregated and reaggregated into what seems like green chalk when there was no green chalk in the room before? Or has it, on the other hand, been brought from outside the room by "passage of matter through matter," as the phrase goes? , In reality I think that we have not knowledge enough to make a broad distinction between seemingly different operations of this transcendental kind. D. D. Home's guides denied the possibility of the passage of matter through matter; but Sir William Crookes has narrated how in Home's presence a thick stalk passed uninjured through a chink in the table, through which no human power could thus have pushed it.

Again, when, as quoted a few pages above, Home's guides withdrew the brandy from the brandy-and-water, was not that a passage of the material alcohol through the material water? To suppose that the special form of cohesion which we call solidity is alone insuperable by such powers as these does not seem to me a specially plausible view. Even in our own world we could hardly have guessed, a priori, that a bullet would sink, or a floating cork rise through apparently solid cold pitch by the slow force of gravity forcing asunder the tenacious mass, or that a copper wire could be passed insensibly through a block of ice by melting and regelation. Or let me, on the other hand, suppose a man who had never seen anything but explosions of dynamite. To him it would seem easy to shatter rocks with gases, but almost impossible to lift or pierce the vast superincumbent weight of air. We should have to explain to him that it was really easier to shoot through air than through rock, if you only propelled your rifle bullet slowly enough to allow the air to get out of the way. Or to get matter through matter may be like the puzzles which consist in getting linked rings through linked rings; there is plenty of space if you can only circumvent the attachments.

I do not think then that we need either postulate a fourth dimension to explain Mr. Moses' apports, or even adopt the more anthropomorphic conception that they were taken up one chimney and down another. At the same time, there are few of the incidents recorded which this last supposition might not be pressed to cover.