The Society for Psychical Research at 100: Beyond the Threshold

When the Society for Psychical Research reached its centenary in February 1982, the anniversary was marked by a number of events.  Heinemann published a series of books, edited by Brian Inglis; Renée Haynes wrote a history of the Society; and Ivor Grattan-Guinness edited a collection of introductory essays on various aspects of psychical research.  Michael Thalbourne carried out an SPR Centenary Census to which half the membership responded, and the results of which were reported in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1984 and the SPR’s Journal in 1994.

The regular lecture series held at the Kensington Central library was titled the ‘Centenary Year 1982 Lecture Programme’ (as was the custom in grander days, the Presidential Address was given at the Royal Society, as was the Myers Memorial Lecture that year).  In August, a ‘Centenary Jubilee Conference’ took place in Cambridge in conjunction with the Parapsychological Association, including a formal banquet, and the following year an issue of Research in Parapsychology appeared containing conference abstracts and papers.

The BBC broadcast a 45-minute radio programme, Beyond the Threshold, on Radio 4, and thanks to ‘evpman’ it has been uploaded to YouTube.  Presenter June Knox-Mawer traces the history of the Society, setting its origins in the context of loss of faith in Christian dogma, the growth of Spiritualism, and an interest in abilities that exceeded the limits of human senses such as thought transference.  She emphasises its elite membership in the early years, and the investigations of telepathy and survival resulting in such pioneering works as Phantasms of the Living (1886), the ‘Census of Hallucinations’ (1894), and extensive Proceedings.

Knox-Mawer highlights various notable points in the SPR’s history, and there are interviews with senior SPR members.  Historian of the early SPR Alan Gauld, the only participant still with us, talks about the early interest in survival and mentions the sceptical approach exemplified by Frank Podmore, a co-author of Phantasms of the Living.  He draws attention to the tremendous energy expended in the first decades, and particularly the importance of the seminal work on hypnosis.

Arthur Ellison was the president at the time of the broadcast and he discusses the change from mediums as an object of scrutiny to a more collaborative approach (the consequences of which were seen later in the study of the Scole phenomena he undertook with Montague Keen and David Fontana, when the three were criticised for lack of rigour in excluding fraud).  He refers to the Toronto Philip experiment, but curiously neither he nor the other interviewees mentions the Enfield poltergeist case, though both Haynes and Grattan-Guinness include references to it in their books.

Renée Haynes, who joined in the 1940s, talks about the composition of the Society in those days, members sharing a similar outlook grounded in membership of institutions such as the older universities, the Civil Service and the military.  She recounts that when a fellow member said she did not want a person to join because he wasn’t a ‘gentleman’, she meant there was no guarantee he would meet the requisite standards.  In other words, he wasn’t one of us.  When I joined in the late 1980s I found a similar condescending attitude on the part of the Council Old Guard.*  Having known Renée, I’m sure she brought a breezy informality with her from the start.

Brian Inglis notes a divide between those who pursue scientific programmes and those with a more general interest who find articles in the Journal to be too technical and difficult to understand (hence a newsletter was instituted in 1981, to appeal to a broader audience, and this evolved into the current glossy magazine).  He refers to the split which created ASSAP, the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (also created in 1981, still thriving, and still with an anti-SPR animus among some members after 40 years), alluding vaguely to ‘internal rows’ as a cause of the schism.  Unfortunately, he is unable to remember what the acronym stands for.

The Hon. Secretary, Anita Gregory, sadly speaking only a couple of years before her untimely death, discusses spontaneous cases and the kinds of approaches the Society receives from the public, not all of them from individuals of sound mind, she claims.  Such requests, she continues, give rise to a conflict between wanting to help and wanting to observe for the sake of research, never an easy issue to resolve (today’s ethical standards would disagree).

Discussing why investigators so often find phenomena have died down, she responds that it can be difficult to know whether there was nothing there in the first place, or whether some subtle effect created by the investigator’s presence inhibits it.  There is evidence the most violent phenomena occur in the early stages of a case, and later on people help things along.  It had been the general rule to stop taking an interest once people were caught cheating, but Gregory believes this is a mistake, as cases are often a mix of genuine and fake.  Gregory was depicted in The Conjuring 2, which was – very loosely – based on the Enfield case.

In answer to the key question of how the SPR would measure its achievements and influence, Haynes claims there is now more knowledge of the subject and acceptance of telepathy.  Gauld argues there is a wider understanding that looking into these matters is not the province of cranks or the credulous.  He makes the bold assertion that if there had been no SPR then there would have been no American SPR, and consequently no Duke University laboratory (where J B Rhine had established an influential parapsychology unit).

Ellison thinks the present moment is a watershed, with greater appreciation among scientists that there is something meriting study.  In particular, he sees an increasing awareness that psychical research has important implications for an understanding of personality.  Optimistically he considers scientific acceptance to be close, with more rapid progress likely as the SPR enters its second century.  There is no sense nearly forty years on that his upbeat assessment has been borne out.

Inglis, who seems to have had an ambivalent attitude towards the SPR, pointing out he had ‘many harsh things to say’ about it, thinks it will cope with new developments, maintaining its high standards and integrity.  The influence of Uri Geller at this time can be gleaned from Inglis’s prediction of psychokinesis as the coming thing because with metal bending one can observe the metal bend, even though, he continues, many in the Society consider Geller to be a fraud.  Like Ellison, Inglis forecasts science and psychical research coming closer together, but with the latter prone to the ‘inkfish effect’ (a term apparently from Arthur Koestler which has not caught on): things go wrong or the desired result fails to occur, thwarting the investigator’s endeavours

Haynes and Gauld both bemoan an increasing focus on technique and the drive to create perfect experiments in the artificial circumstances of the laboratory, with a loss of psychological richness, rather than on what happens in real-life situations: pursuit of the experimental method has for some become an end in itself.  Gauld suspects the founders might feel we had lost the larger question: the experience of people in ordinary situations, rather than in the restricted lab context.  On the other hand, he sees a swing back to an interest in spontaneous phenomena, tackling puzzles that we find in everyday life.  Forty years on, the tension between the experimental and spontaneous is still with us.

The programme can currently be found on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikP388G8Seg

 

*As an example of how little in some respects the SPR’s ‘not one of us’ attitude had changed since its foundation, even beyond its centenary, the January 1997 issue of Uri Geller’s Encounters (subtitled ‘The World’s Most Paranormal Magazine’) carried an article devoted to the SPR.  This contained a reference to an investigation the Anglia Paranormal Research Group, of which I was a member, had conducted at St Botolph’s, a redundant church at Skidbrooke, Lincolnshire, and about which I had written in the SPR’s magazine The Psi Researcher the previous year.

The article also included an interview with Arthur Ellison.  Arthur was very excited about this and brandished a copy at an SPR Council meeting.  He informed the gathering we had kindly been offered a full-page advertisement for the SPR in the magazine gratis.  As the SPR article formed the basis of Uri Geller’s editorial (calling it ‘our major feature on the Society for Psychical Research’) it is entirely possible this gesture came from the man himself.

I thought it a generous offer, and would enable us to reach a large number of potential members, yet there was reluctance by some present to take it up, and after discussion it was decided to decline on the grounds it could attract the ‘wrong’ kind of person, one who failed to conform to our standards (i.e. the typical reader of Uri Geller’s Encounters).  When I had joined a decade earlier it was still a requirement to have two members vouch for an applicant.  Fortunately, such ossified attitudes have faded with the passing of that generation.

 

References

Blackmore, Susan J. Beyond the Body: An Investigation of Out-of-the-Body Experiences, London: Heinemann, 1982.

Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival: A Century of Investigations, London: Heinemann, 1982.

Grattan-Guinness, Ivor, ed. Psychical Research, A Guide to its History, Principles and Practices: In Celebration of 100 Years of the Society for Psychical Research, Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1982.

Haynes, Renée. The Society for Psychical Research, 1882-1982: A History, London: Macdonald, 1982.

MacKenzie, Andrew. Hauntings and Apparitions, London: Heinemann, 1982.

Richards, Mel. ‘Society for Psychical Research’, Uri Geller’s Encounters, Issue 3, January 1997, pp. 30-33.

Roll, William G, John Beloff & Rhea A. White, eds. Research in Parapsychology 1982: Jubilee Centenary Issue. Abstracts and Papers from the Combined Twenty-Fifth Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association and the Centenary Conference of the Society for Psychical Research. Metuchen, N.J. and London: Scarecrow Press, 1983.

Ruffles, Tom. ‘Field Investigation – St Botolph, Skidbrooke: A Follow-Up’, The Psi Researcher, No. 20, February 1996, pp. 7-8.

Thalbourne, Michael A. A Glossary of Terms Used in Parapsychology, London: Heinemann, 1982.

Thalbourne, Michael A. ‘The SPR Centenary Census. I. The ESP Test’, Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. 48, 1984, pp. 238-239.

Thalbourne, Michael A. ‘The SPR Centenary Census. II. The Survey of Beliefs and Experiences’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 59, 1994, pp. 420-431.

Zohar, Dana. Through the Time Barrier, London: Heinemann, 1982.

B.P. Hasdeu’s Psychic Photographs

Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu was a writer, editor, historian, philologist, folklorist, jurist and politician, described by Mircea Eliade as ‘the most erudite Romanian of the 19th century.’  He was born in 1838 at Cristinești, Moldavia, where his middle-class family owned a small estate.  His father, also a polymath, had an interest in esoteric writings.  The story of the grand building Bogdan Hasdeu erected at Câmpina, known as the Iulia Hasdeu Castle, is well known, his experiments in psychic photography less so.

His beloved only daughter Iulia contracted tuberculosis and died in 1888 at the age of 18.  She was buried in Bellu Cemetery in Bucharest in an elaborate tomb.  Highly talented, she had studied at the Sorbonne, spoke several languages, and left a large quantity of writings that indicated great promise.  As a result of his bereavement, Hasdeu became a Spiritualist, or perhaps had previous Spiritualist leanings confirmed, and was influenced by the ideas of Allan Kardec.

His Sic Cogito, the first book on Spiritualism in Romanian, was published in instalments in his journal Revista Nouă from March 1891, and in book form in 1893, with a third edition in 1895.  In it, he describes how in March 1889, six months after his daughter died, he was sitting at his desk when he suddenly began to write automatically, producing a message in her handwriting which said she was happy, she loved him, and they would meet again.  This was the first in a series of communications purporting to come from Iulia.

Iulia’s Castle was intended both as a tribute to her and as a way to maintain contact.  The elaborate structure, full of esoteric symbolism, was built between 1894 and 1896 to his own design in mediumistic consultation with Iulia, and séances were held there.  As well as his daughter, his father, grandfather, brother and wife (also named Iulia, who died in 1902) communicated.  Hasdeu lived in the house from 1897 to his death in 1907.  Restored after having fallen into neglect during the Ceaușescu years, it is now the Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu Memorial Museum.

As well as conducting séances, Hasdeu actively pursued his interest in Spiritualism more broadly.  A brief news item in Two Worlds in July 1891 relates that he had written to the Revue Spirite to introduce a young Romanian medical student, ‘mechanical writing medium’, and member of the Spiritual Society of Bucharest (of which Hasdeu was presumably also a member) who was about to arrive in Paris.

Determined to put his investigations on a scientific basis, Hasdeu explored the possibilities of photography as a means of objectively recording psychic phenomena.  His article ‘Studie Fisice asupra Spiritului: D. Fourtier si Fotografia Extra-Retinala’ [‘Physical Study on the Spirit: D. Fourtier and Extra-Retinal Photography’] which appeared in the February-March 1894 issue of Revista Nouă was accompanied by one of his psychic photographs (Appendix 1 lists publications in which Hasdeu’s photographs can be seen).

The Religio-Philosophical Journal of 2 June 1894, and Light, 30 June 1894, both carried articles drawing on a report by Rossi de Glustlanianl in La Revue Spirite.  This stated that Spiritualism was making great progress in Romania, largely thanks to the efforts of Hasdeu.  He was holding seances twice weekly, the sitters were all professionals, and allegedly even the mediums had university degrees.  Whatever the truth of the latter claim, Hasdeu’s social standing had certainly attracted a circle of intellectuals.  The reports referred to photographic experiments in similar terms, that in Light concluding:

‘Some spirit heads, more or less visible, have been obtained by photography in the most complete darkness, the photographic apparatus being hermetically closed and sealed.  M. Hasdeu expects, in a new work which he is preparing, and which will be a sequel to his “Sic Cogito,” to include all the spirit photographs which he has obtained, and to give, at the same time, all the details of these curious and interesting experiments.’ (Hasdeu’s obituary in The Annals of Psychical Science in 1907 states that Sic Cogito was ‘his only spiritistic work.’)

Reference was made in an article on spirit photography written by M. Lecomte in Paris-Photographe (30 December 1894) to two articles Hasdeu had published in Bucharest.  Lecomte included one of Hasdeu’s images that had appeared in the February-March 1894 issue of Revista Nouă.  Hasdeu was in close touch with his counterparts in France, but Paris-Photographe was a general photography magazine, suggesting interest outside Spiritualistic circles in his activities.

Hippolyte Baraduc (who the same year Hasdeu died himself lost a child of a similar age to Iulia) promoted Hasdeu’s photographic experiments in his book L'Ame Humaine, published in 1896 and translated into English as The Human Soul in 1913.  L'Ame Humaine was drawn on by the July 1896 issue of W T Stead’s Borderland, which included a lengthy section devoted to articles on ‘psychic photography’, largely dealing with images obtained without an exposure.

Baraduc printed what he termed a ‘psychicone’ (‘psychic icon’) made by Hasdeu and described as showing ‘the possibility of the creative spirit acting on a plate without the help of the hand.’  A patch in a photograph was said to represent Hasdeu’s brother Nicolae, who like Iulia had died at the age of 18, his image having been ‘modulated’ in Hasdeu’s mind and then projected (in a chapter in Sic Cogito on ‘Materialism in Spiritualism’, Hasdeu said that ‘In the phenomenon of the spiritualist photography, the sensitive plate does not transcribe a real shape, but only an idea that is occurring in a medium’s brain at that moment’).

Baraduc and Borderland also provided an account, and psychicones, of an experiment with Istrati.  This involved telepathic transmission between Hasdeu and his colleague and friend Dr Constantin Istrati.  Istrati was, according to Baraduc, about to travel to ‘Campana’ (actually Câmpina, location of both his home and the future location of Iulia’s Castle, just under a hundred kilometres from Bucharest), and he agreed to try to project himself onto Hasdeu’s plates at Bucharest.  When Hasdeu went to bed on the night of 4 August 1893, he placed a camera at his head and another at his feet (Borderland erroneously assumed he had only put plates at his head and feet).

As Istrati fell asleep, he exerted his will to appear on Hasdeu’s plates.  When he awoke, he felt he had succeeded, as he dreamt he had appeared to Hasdeu.  The Borderland article reprints part of a letter Hasdeu wrote to ‘M. de R’ (Albert de Rochas) and forwarded to Borderland: ‘Upon the plaque A there are are (sic) three attempts of which one...is extremely successful. The doctor is seen looking attentively into the apparatus, the bronze extremity of which is illuminated by the light peculiar to his spirit.’ On his return to Bucharest, Istrati was astonished at the resemblance to himself of ‘the fluidic image’.  Borderland refers to ‘the already famous portrait of Dr. Istrati,’ implying wide circulation.

Hasdeu has generally been overlooked by recent historians of psychic photography.  A notable exception is Andreas Fischer, who opens his essay ‘“La Lune au Front”: Remarks on the History of the Photography of Thought’ in the 2005 volume The Perfect Medium with an account of Hasdeu’s August 1893 experiment.  Fischer states that Hasdeu used cameras set up in his bedroom with the shutters open, and quotes from a letter Hasdeu sent to de Rochas, dated 12 August 1895 (presumably the letter a copy of which de Rochas sent to Stead at Borderland), held in the Rochas Archives, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia: ‘I picture the Doctor with the…desire to bring his spirit before my cameras during the night.’

Fischer notes that this has generally been considered the first experiment in thought photography, but points out that it differs little from previous attempts at photographing a double, for example the 1875 projection of the ‘spirit’ of Stainton Moses while asleep in London to the camera of Édouard Isidore Buguet in Paris.  He reproduces one of Hasdeu’s images, with a comparison portrait of Istrati, which are held in the Rochas Archive in Philadelphia.  This is taken from an original gelatin silver print and is uncropped, whereas that in L'Ame Humaine and Borderland shows only the portion said to be of Istrati.

In recent months the website Camera Arhiva has scanned and put online a large number of Romanian magazines published between 1947 and 1989.  Perhaps surprisingly, given the ideological climate, in 1979 Revista Manuscriptum published a number of Hasdeu’s psychic photographs, though less surprisingly Hasdeu’s preoccupation was cast in pathological terms.  An accompanying article signed by C. Săvulescu describes how he was researching a history of Romanian photography when he discovered a large quantity of Hasdeu’s plates, and six of these are reproduced (as shown above).  Constantin Săvulescu was a historian of photography who published Cronologia Ilustratǎ a Fotografiei din România : Perioada 1834-1916 in 1985.

 

This is a translation of Săvulescu’s text:

‘During research undertaken for a possible history of photography in Romania, a lot of 68 original images (12 x 16 format), made by B.P. Hasdeu between 1893-1896, were identified in the holdings of the State Archives in Bucharest.

‘Examining them, I found that on the back of many of them the writer had made some notations in pencil. Here are some: Code II, 825/3 <<No. Wednesday to Thursday, 21 July. You were evoking Dr. Istrati who is in Constanța. Not only was the room made a dark room, but precaution was taken so that no light would pass through. The device was opened in the dark at 11 hours, closed at 8 ¼ >>.

‘Code II, 825/2: << No. G. 15 July, Thursday to Friday. Went to bed late, woke up around 8 o’clock, it was exposed too short a period >>.

‘Code II, 825/17: << No. V. Tuesday to Wednesday 18 Oct with the red light and the camera open, and on Wednesday, evoking Dr. Istrati, there was nothing >>.

‘The photos represent some curiosities, the consequence of some obsessions arising from the famous drama that marked the last years of the writer's life. Experiences like this represent an unwelcome scene, just as at the time they aroused the irony and compassion of some of his contemporaries. Dr Istrati, invoked here, recorded in his diary on 1 August, 1907: <<... so many charlatans pretending to be inspired and who deceived him with their mediumship, distancing him from his real friends. Now there is nothing left to squeeze, they are notable by their absence>>.

‘Entrusting these few photos to the press, we are left with the feeling that another secret from the nebulous universe of the romantic poet was betrayed by reality.’

C. Săvulescu

 

Săvulescu’s reference to 68 images means there are 62 more sitting in an archive in Bucharest that have possibly never been published.  One or two points are raised by these sample descriptions, and doubtless further study of the collection would raise more.

The dates Hasdeu provides are ambiguous as a single date is assigned to two days, but presumably indicate that the experiments were carried out overnight.  This is indeed the case: 21 July was a Tuesday in 1891, a Thursday in 1892 and a Friday in 1893; 1892 was a leap year, hence there was no Wednesday 21 July.  So ‘Wednesday to Thursday, 21 July’ must refer to Thursday 21 July 1892.  15 July was a Friday in 1892.  Thus, it can be seen Hasdeu was conducting experiments at least a year earlier than the famous 4 August 1893 effort, attempting to communicate with Istrati at Constanța on the Black Sea coast.  The other date noted, 18 October, was a Wednesday in 1893.

There is clearly further research to be conducted on Hasdeu’s experiments, in order to assess which archives hold his results, to ascertain the composition of those experiments, and to examine what he himself said about them.  He made a significant contribution to the field of psychic photography, and his output deserves to be better known.

 

References:

Lacroix, Henry. ‘The “Revue Spirite” (Paris)’, The Two Worlds, Vol. 4, No. 190, 3 July 1891, p. 396.

Hasdeu, B.P. ‘Studie Fisice asupra Spiritului: D. Fourtier si Fotografia Extra-Retinala’ [‘Physical Study on the Spirit: D. Fourtier and Extra-Retinal Photography’], Revista Nouă, Nos.11-12, February-March 1894.

‘Spiritualism in Roumania’, The Religio-Philosophical Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2 (new series), 16 June 1894, pp. 40-41.

‘Interesting Experiments in Roumania’, Light, Vol. 14, No. 703, 30 June 1894, p. 304.

Lecomte, M. ‘Photographie Spirite’, Paris-Photographe, 30 December 1894, pp. 433-41.

Hasdeu, B.P. Sic Cogito: E Viaţa? Ce e Moartea? Ce e Omul? Bucharest: Editura Librăriei Socecŭ, 3^rd edition, 1895.  First published in instalments in Revista Nouă from March 1891.

‘Psychic Photography’, Borderland, Vol. 3, No. 3, July 1896, pp. 313-21.

Baraduc, H. L'Ame Humaine, ses mouvements, ses lumières, et l'iconographie de l'invisible fluidique. Paris: Georges Carré, 1896.

‘The Death of Prof. Bogdan P. Hasdeu’, The Annals of Psychic Science, Vol. 6, No. 36, 1907, pp. 440-442.

Flournoy, Theodore. Spiritism and Psychology (translated and abridged by Hereward Carrington). New York: Harper & Bros., 1911.

Delanne, Gabriel. ‘Le Spiritisme est une Science’, La Vie Mystérieuse, 10 December 1911, pp. 356-7.

Baraduc, H. The Human Soul, its Movements, its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible. Paris: Librairie Internationale de la Pensée Nouvelle, 1913.

Duxbury, E. W. ‘M. Leon Denis on Automatic Writing’, Psychic Science, Vol. 6, No. 2, July 1927, pp. 123-28.

Săvulescu, C. ‘B. P. Hasdeu’, Revista Manuscriptum, Issue 34, 1979.

Fischer, Andreas. ‘“La Lune au Front”: Remarks on the History of the Photography of Thought’ in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 139-153. Originally published in French as Le Troisième œil: La photographie et l'occulte, Paris: Gallimard, 2004.

Mihalcencova, Corina. ‘B. P. Hasdeu Under the Lens of Spiritual Practice’ in conference proceedings Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu: Patrie, Onoare şi Ştiinţă [Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu: Homeland, Honor and Science], Cahul, Moldova, 23 March 2018. Cahul: 2018, pp. 70-80.

Nemes, Constantin. ‘Practica spiritista a lui Hasdeu’ [‘Hasdeu's Spiritualist Practice’],

https://www.rauflorin.ro/practica-spiritista-a-lui-hasdeu/, 11 June 2011, retrieved 17 March 2021.

Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu Memorial Museum website, http://muzeulhasdeu.ro/en/index.php, retrieved 30 March 2021.

 

Appendix 1

Images by Hasdeu can be seen in the following publications.  As a number reprinted the same images, these represent only a small proportion of his output.  I would be interested to hear of other publications which have covered Hasdeu’s photography.

Hasdeu, B.P. ‘Studie Fisice asupra Spiritului: D. Fourtier si Fotografia Extra-Retinala’ [‘Physical Study on the Spirit: D. Fourtier and Extra-Retinal Photography’], Revista Nouă, Nos.11-12, February-March 1894.*

Lecomte, M. ‘Photographie Spirite’, Paris-Photographe, 30 December 1894.

‘Psychic Photography’, Borderland, Vol. 3, No. 3, July 1896.

Baraduc, H. L'Ame Humaine, ses mouvements, ses lumières, et l'iconographie de l'invisible fluidique. Paris: Georges Carré, 1896.

Baraduc, H. The Human Soul, its Movements, its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible. Paris: Librairie Internationale de la Pensée Nouvelle, 1913.

Săvulescu, C. ‘B. P. Hasdeu’, Revista Manuscriptum, Issue 34, 1979.

Fischer, Andreas. ‘“La Lune au Front”: Remarks on the History of the Photography of Thought’ in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

*Illustrated in blogpost by Constantin Nemes, ‘Practica spiritista a lui Hasdeu’, posted 11 June 2011.

 

Appendix 2

A note on spelling.

While Hasdeu did not spell his name using the diacritic (i.e., Hașdeu), it is pronounced as though the diacritic is present.  Romanian-language sources are divided on whether to include the diacritic or omit it, and I have chosen to spell the name as Hasdeu himself did.