This work comes strictly from the rationalist camp of its era. Seeking primarily to discredit phrenology, dowsing, seances, and spiritualistic beliefs in general, Clodd managed to perform two tasks; first, to give a good cautionary warning to occultists, and second to categorize some interesting phenomena (including the legendary appearance of angels on WWI battlefields, aiding...
This particular work is written from the perspective of sometimes quite severe skepticism towards folklore of various kinds, from the disorganized and tribal (and often antiquated) to the then-modern, medical, and "scientific." Amusingly, some of its then-accepted scientific conjectures are now themselves classed as pseudoscience and hokum.
