Excerpt from The Weird Adventures of Professor Delapine of the Sorbonne When travelling in France a few years ago during the summer vacation, I made the acquaintance of a professor of world-wide fame, which acquaintance soon ripened into a lasting friendship. Among the various subjects which we dealt with in our conversation, I happened to mention Spiritualism. I told him how bitterly disappointed I had been at the various s ances I had attended. Either the s ance had passed off without any phenomena at all, or if anything did occur, it had turned out invariably to be a palpable fraud, and had left me more sceptical than ever - besides, I added, the oracular utterances delivered by the medium when in an hysterical condition, which is palmed off to the audience as a trance, were so nonsensical and meaningless as to leave me in doubt whether to be amused at the gullibility of the public, or disgusted at the time I had thrown away in listening to such nonsense. Yes, replied the Professor thoughtfully, that always used to be my view of Spiritualism, but since I have seriously examined the subject for myself I have entirely changed my views on the subject. So far from scofling at it, as I confess I used to, I am now convinced that the real phenomena are far and away more astonishing than are these which these Charlatans profess to exhibit or actually produce by conjuring and fraud. Now, if you wish to be convinced that there are genuine phenomena, come with me to Paris and we will investigate the subject together at the great S Hospital. Here we found indeed a rich field for our studies. We witnessed there all the phenomena of suggestion, second-sight, clair audience, hypnotism, dual-consciousness, telepathy, the movement of objects without contact, and many other occurrences of such a surprising nature that in our present state of ignorance they appeared to be altogether outside the laws of Nature as we understand them; and I went away entirely convinced that certain people possess powers such as we ordinary mortals have never even dreamt of. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.