McDOUGALL DOUBTS TRUTH OF "MARGERY'S" CLAIMS

Dr. William McDougall, Professor of Psychology at the University, and a member of the committee invited by the Scientific American to judge the claims of mediums to produce super-normal physical phenomena, yesterday made the first public statement as to why the committee would not recognize "Margery".

Dr. McDougall has made several attempts to have "Margery" come to the University psychology laboratory for observation but she refused his offers.

The principle reason for Dr. McDougall's refusal to endorse the genuineness of the phenomena produced by "Margery" is the unsatisfactory nature of the condition imposed by the medium on her investigators. That she has failed to give evidences of supernormal phenomena, Dr. McDougall does not assert. His attitude on this point is defined as follows: "She has produced a very considerable quantity of such phenomena. The defect is in respect of the quality rather than of the quantity of the evidence. What I do assert is that the evidence of the opposite tendency far outweights the evidence of supernormality."

Even photographs of ectoplasm, Dr. McDougall questioned. He implied that a close examination would reveal that the substance was actually some organism such as the "lung of some animal, surgical manipulated so as to resemble roughly in shape a human hand".