ABSTRACT
The investigations of physical mediums which Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney and the Sidgwicks had carried out in the eighteen-seventies had made them question the utility of pursuing that line of enquiry any further. The Sidgwick group’s most active investigators of physical phenomena in general and of slate-writing in particular, were Mrs. Sidgwick and a newcomer to the Cambridge scene, Richard Hodgson. There were several prominent members of the Society for Psychical Research who did not altogether relinquish their belief in some at least of the physical phenomena of Spiritualism. In 1887 a committee on physical phenomena was once again established; its members were Myers, W. F. Barrett, Sir William Crookes, O. J. Lodge, Henry Sidgwick and Angelo Lewis. After William Stainton Moses’ death in 1892 the records were passed to Myers, who devoted the first of his two long articles on ‘The Experiences of W. Stainton Moses’ especially to the physical phenomena.
