The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BORDERLAND SCIENCE

They took several hundred photographs of what were claimed to be partial materializations. One of the most striking of these we reproduce. The features of this figure, writes Mme. Bisson, who worked with the Baron in these experiments, ‘‘ express earnestness and dignity, as in a conventional Christ-like head.” It stands “‘ with crossed arms and upward gaze and by its height and attitude gives an impression of solemnity.” The reader may judge for himself. It is interesting for the reader to ask himself what he would have imagined from Mme. Bisson’s description and to compare it with this flashlight record. Here evidently we have the will to see the thing in the best light and in a mood of exaltation put quite plainly on record.

Before the days of flashlight photography Tissot, the great painter, was shown what he believed to be the reincarnation of a woman friend in the company of a spirit guide. He painted the very beautiful impression he received and made a noble picture. The harsher methods now in use permit of no such sublimations of the vision. Our cameras show the actual things. Often these figures and faces begin small and are, as it were, inflated to a proper size.

Whatever these flattened and crumpled visages and figures may be, they are certainly not materializations in living flesh and blood ; these chosen photographs demonstrate clearly that they never resemble anything more than queer flimsy stuff bearing the likeness of a painted face, whose eyes never move, whose eyelids never flicker, whose lips are fixed in one rigid expression.

In the great days of the past the alleged materializations appeared with a certain quiet dignity, but now they arise in a less agreeable fashion. They begin by being exuded by the medium as a formless stuff (styled ieleplasm or ectoplasm). Usually but not necessarily, the exudation occurs by mouth and nose; it may sometimes come out of the head and neck, the ears, or from other orifices of the medium. It has a quantitative abundance like the foam of bottled beer when the beer is “up.” It may have as little substance. This ooze presently takes on forms and, it is asserted, organic structure also. Possibly all the cctoplasm does not come from the same

Fig. 331. _ Photograph

source or have the same nature. There may be a primary ectoplasm and secondary ectoplasm or ectoplasms produced in other ways. Hands, feet, grotesque bestial forms and at last these crumpled paper-bag faces emerge from the accumulating stuff. Jan Guzik, of Warsaw, materialized pet dogs. Parrots have also been recalled from the Great Beyond. There is no record known

C

by Mme. Bisson of a materialized visttant produced by the medium Eva C.

To show the figure, the medium is holding aside the curtains of the cabinet which concealed her during the sitting. Schrenck-Notzing, from his “ Phenomena of Materialisation.”

(Courtesy of Baron von Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Lid.)

to us of canaries or white mice which have “passed over” returning to comfort their surviving owners, and no materialization of departed invertebrates, flies, spiders or the like which have solved the great mystery, has occurred. But this may come.

There is much to arouse prejudice in the literature of this ectoplasmic research. Many of its illustrations are ugly to the

847