consult him, his medical knowledge is extremely limited; he does not know the Latin names of the various drugs which he prescribes, and cannot recognise common medicinal herbs when shown to him. In other words, he has given no indications of possessing any scientific knowledge of medicine. Moreover, though professing to be the spirit of a French doctor, his knowledge of French appears to extend only to a few simple phrases, and a slight accent, occasionally serviceable in disguising a bad shot at a proper name. This ignorance of his native language is, he explains, due to his having lived for some yearsin Metz, where there were many English residents I When all these suspicious circumstances, especially the similarity between the names of Finné and Phinuit, were brought by Dr. Hodgson to Phinuit's notice, that personage professed to remember that his real name was not after all Phinuit, but Alaen. Further, he betrayed some uncertainty whether he had been born at Marseilles or Metz, and whether he had passed the latter part of his life at Metz or Paris. It seems, then, that we need not seriously consider whether Phinuit is in very deed the spirit he would be taken for.
Mrs. Piper in ordinary life knows nothing of her sayings and doings in the trance state, and the above account implies, of course, no reflection on her honesty. But in attempting to estimate the significance of the more striking impersonations which have characterised Mrs. Piper's later trances,
