(W. Whately Smith)
To the last sentence of the preceding section someone will probably retort, “If only critics would stop talking about fraud and examine the phenomena at first hand, they would be convinced and we should have a chance of getting on with the war and finding out all sorts of interesting things.” It is not really a fair retort, because it is always perfectly legitimate to point out sources of error in any experimental work without being called upon to repeat the faulty experiments oneself. But although all the evidence seems to me to point one way, I freely admit that I may be wrong and that genuine spirit photographs may be produced. If so, I should very much like to be able to convince myself of the fact and to give the utmost publicity in my power to any positive results I might obtain. But it is no use my attempting to do so under the conditions which normally obtain at a
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 photographic séance. I know, to be sure, a certain amount about fraudulent methods, and might, perhaps, be not quite so easy a prey as others who know less. But I am not so conceited as to flatter myself for a moment that I am a match for a really competent trickster. I know just enough to realise how very great an advantage the latter always has and how hopeless it is for any but the very elect to pit themselves against him. I do not imagine, as apparently do many worthy spiritualists who do not even know the first word about fraud, that my not extraordinary powers of observation are a match for the adroit and experienced medium, and I would no more back myself to spot fraud every time it was tried than I would back myself to win money off a cardsharper!
If one were allowed real test conditions, it would be quite another matter. But one is not. One is allowed to watch—when one’s attention is not distracted by some natural-seeming incident; one is allowed to perform for oneself all kinds of operations which are quite irrelevant to the modus operandi of the trick; one is allowed to bring, if not always to use, one’s own plates. But as already pointed out, the loopholes left for fraud are so numerous that it is vain to hope to guard against them all. In fact, the most suspicious feature about the whole of psychic photography is the fact that a procedure is insisted on which must give these innumerable loopholes and the obvious “safe” procedure is never, so far as I know, allowed at all.
If the account of fraudulent methods given above is referred to again, it will be seen that of the twenty-two varieties there noted, no less than eighteen depend on either (a) the use of the medium’s faked camera or slides, or (b) the fact that the plates are loaded into slides, the slides placed in the camera, the plates removed from the slides and also developed “on the premises.” The only methods to which this does not apply are the first of all and those involving preparation of the studio or dark-room and noted in Group II., Section A, to which might possibly be added the X-ray method. These three last can easily be eliminated by working in one’s own or a “neutral” studio, while the former eighteen could all be prevented by using the investigator’s own magazine or roll-film camera, loading it before the séance, taking it away immediately afterwards, and deve............