ABSTRACT
Crookes had burned his fingers badly in the eyes of the Royal Society when claiming the existence of a psychic force in mediums such as Daniel Home. Although he did not immediately drop his investigation of mediumship, he quickly redeemed himself through his work on thallium and radiation. Crookes understood that, by the standards of men of science in the 1870s, it was unprofessional to become embroiled in controversy with paradoxers. Controversy was best left to inter-scientific disputes between professionals. The reputations of both Crookes and Wallace were undermined by taking on spiritualism. Wallace made it even worse for himself in the eyes of the Royal Society when he challenged flat-earth paradoxers.1 Crookes’ strategy was to abandon any attempt to interest the scientific community directly in his psychic investigations. Instead, he turned to a more amenable audience, that of the spiritualists themselves. By and large, this polarizing of his researches was ignored by the scientific community until attention was drawn to it again in the late 1870s.
