In early May 1868, the correspondence pages of the Pall Mall Gazette (PMG) were the scene of a heated debate between two of the most well known figures of the day, Professor John Tyndall and Mr Daniel Dunglas Home. Each man was the recognized leader of his field, but their fields were apparently diametrically opposed. Tyndall was head of the Royal Institution and the natural heir to the late Michael Faraday as experimental philosopher and materialist scientist; Home was celebrated across Europe and America as a gifted spiritualist medium, whose physical phenomena were unsurpassed. Their topic was a séance proposed in 1861, at which Faraday was to have examined spiritualist phenomena produced by Home, but which had not ultimately taken place. The two men began a stiffly polite dialogue within the correspondence columns, but rapidly degenerated into personal attacks and self-vindicating reasoning. By the time they called a truce in late May, the debate had clearly demonstrated the strength of the barriers constructed between established scientific practice and areas of investigation still regarded as beyond the scientific pale.