he can clothe any corporeal thing with any corporeal form, so as to appear therein.” Moreover almost any séance will be sufficient reply to Dorn Calmet’s question. In his Modern Spiritism, (1904), Mr. T. Godfrey Raupert says: “Photographs, or small drawing-room ornaments have thus been seen to change their places, and articles kept in a room other than that occupied by the sensitive, have been brought through closed doors and deposited at a spot previously indicated—in some instances placed into the hands of the person requesting the apport of the article. Many such remarkable instances of apport and of matter passing through matter have been observed under the strictest possible test conditions, and will be found recorded in the late Leipzig Professor Zoellner’s deeply interesting work Transcendental Physics. The writer has himself observed one instance of this kind in a private house, and in circumstances entirely precluding the possibility of deception. There is, perhaps, no phenomenon which so distinctly exhibits the action of extraneous and independent intelligence as this one.” (pp. 35–36.) Matter, then, can pass through matter, and the séance answers Dom Calmet. We may, if we will, adopt the ectoplasmic theory to explain the mode whereby the Vampire issues from his grave, but although this is very probably true (in some instances at all events) it is not necessarily the only solution of the problem. According to Catholic theologians evil spirits, if permitted to materialize their invisible presence, to build up a tangible and active body, do not absolutely require the ectoplasm of some medium.
Not very dissimilar to the dilemma of Dom Calmet are the views held by an eminent authority, Dr. Herbert Mayo, who was sometime Senior Surgeon of Middlesex Hospital, Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in King’s College, Professor of Comparative Anatomy in the Royal College of Surgeons, London. In his well-known work, On the Truths contained in Popular Superstitions, he devotes his second Letter, or rather Chapter, to “Vampyrism,” concerning which he says “The proper place of this subject falls in the midst of a philosophical disquisition,” but he adds for the benefit of the inquirer that it is “a point on which, in my time, school-boys much your juniors entertained decided opinions.” He continues to inform us that during the middle of the eighteenth
