EEN AND UNSEEN" is a wonderful book. If anyone desires to read something that will at once amaze him and thrill him, arouse an angry spirit of contemptuous disbelief, and then compel him to admit that after all these things which he hates and despises may be true, this is the book to buy. To buy, I say, not to borrow; for it is a book which you will want to lend, and which after you have lent will not come back to you, for it will again be lent or stolen, and you will have to buy another copy. For "Seen and Unseen" is a book which more than any other that I have come across is calculated to awaken in the mind of the average reader what will be for him a most weird and unwelcome suspicion that he is living in a world within a world of which he knows nothing, and that he has hitherto had hardly even a glimmering conception of the magic and the mystery of life.

A TRAVELLER IN LANDS UNKNOWN.

When the first navigators to the southern antipodean seas came back telling strange stories of the lands beneath our feet at the other side of the world, such travellers' tales were promptly dismissed by the wiseacres of their time. To this day the clodhopper to whom the wonders of the invisible universe of the infinitely little revealed by the microscope are displayed, is disposed to ask, "Garn! Who are you getting at?" The revelations of the telescope were met by an arrogant, dogmatic scepticism that flung the astronomers into gaol. But to-day the scientist believes in hardly anything but the unseen. It is the invisible atom and the still more impalpable electron that hold the field. Things seen are more and more recognised as evanescent and temporal, and comparatively unimportant; things unseen are eternal, and dominate all.

THE USE OF THE BOOK.

This book, "Seen and Unseen," by its simplicity, its lucidity, its obvious truthfulness and the capacity and standing of its author, will probably effect a permanent breach in the thick and high wall with which many persons have shut themselves in from the unseen world, fearing lest they should see or hear or scent anything inconsistent with their snailshell philosophy. We say this because, however marvellous and apparently incredible are many of the experiences recorded in this fragment of the autobiography of a psychic, they are recorded in such frank, straightforward fashion by such a capable and honest narrator as to compel if not complete conviction, then the reluctant admission, perhaps for the first time, that after all there may be something in it. And then most readers, not being anxious inquirers by any means,

"Seen and Unseen." By E. Katherine Bates. (Greening and Co. 6s.)

will dismiss the subject, satisfying their intellectual conscience by muttering Hamlet's well-worn words to Horatio that epitaph upon many a grave of a belief that was done to death at its birth. But some few will persevere. And to them the vista of their outlook in life will widen immeasurably. A strange sense of the miracle and marvel of the life we are leading here will revive the awe and the glory with which in childhood we trod the mystic glades of fairyland. All the old, delightfully impossible wonders which compassed us around when with trailing clouds of glory we had freshly come from the great Beyond will revive. For if these unseen things were seen by the author they must exist unseen around all of us. And if she possesses senses so acute and faculties so highly developed that she sees and hears often in advance of time, then the human being possesses latent possibilities and powers of which most of us have never dreamed. A book like this makes one feel a vast though vague expansion of the dormant godhood of man.

"EYES AND NO EYES": NEW VERSION. "Seen and Unseen" suggests otherwise than by its title the familiar and most suggestive little story of "Eyes and No Eyes." But whereas everyone appreciates the difference between the two boys, one of whom found a country walk full of objects of interest, while the other found it utterly dull, there are perhaps few who will understand the difference between one who sees like the author of this book and the majority of mortals who are blind. Some don't see because they won't see. Others don't see because they never take the trouble to look for things where they may be found. But the majority don't see because they cannot see, and Nature has fortunately for their complacency endowed them with a fine contempt for those who have a clearer vision and a more sensitive, perception than themselves. "Seen and Unseen" is the personal narrative of what was seen in her walk through life by one who sees. Just as the boy in the Bairns' book sees nests and birds and beasts and all manner of natural wonders where his schoolfellow saw nothing, so Miss Bates has gone through life with her senses constantly conscious of sights and sounds and emotions hidden from other people. In this book she has set down some of them. Only some, and those not by any means the most amazing. For the author is more conscious than most of us of things past, things present, and things

to come.

THE CREDIBILITY OF THE AUTHOR.

The first question that naturally is asked about a book like this is as to the veracity and credibility of the writer. Has this traveller the necessary

credentials of intelligence, honesty, and good faith ? Is her history even meant to be the authentic narrative of actual happenings, or is it the fanciful embroidery of a romantic imagination over a slender framework of fact? To these questions I can make definite answer. The writer of this book to the best of her ability, which is by no means small, has honestly endeavoured to set down with the utmost exactitude just what happened as she saw it, and, as often as possible, immediately after she saw it. The names of persons and of places she had to alter to avoid inflicting inconvenience upon others. But behind the fictitious names are real persons. Many of them are still alive. The book is presented to the public not as a romance, but as a sober matter-offact account of the author's journey of travel and discovery in that most mysterious of all wonderlands the humdrum life of every day.

HER IDENTITY.

The next question, as to the identity of the author, can be answered as easily.

Miss E. Katherine

Bates is the daughter of the Rev. John Ellison Bates, of Christ Church, Dover, the sister of the late Colonel Bates of the Horse Guards, and intimately related to many county families in the South of England. Miss Bates has all her life been in a good position in English society. Educated at Girton, she has spent the greater part of her life in travelling. She has written books of travel, marked by shrewdness of observation and a wide range of knowledge, both of men and things. Her family connections are chiefly in the Army and the Church, but travels in Europe, Asia and America have made her familiar with many. of the most notable of her contemporaries in three Continents. Miss Bates has been a patient and unwearying student of the mysterious psychic laws which encompass our physical being; she is wellknown in the S.P.R., was a close friend of Mr. Richard Hodgson and Phillips Brooks, was well acquainted with Mr. Myers and all the best known students of psychical science. She has nothing to gain by publishing this record of her experiences. She is a person of independent means, of high character, an exceptionally trustworthy witness. The hypothesis that her motive in writing this book was a desire to seek notoriety or to make money is out of the question. Miss Bates has borne testimony from the same high compulsion of a conscientious sense of duty which led the early Quakers to testify. She bears witness, and whatever explanation the reader may suggest as to what she has to say, he can hardly fail to be impressed by her transparent honesty and anxious desire to confine her statements to facts within her own knowledge and observation.

THE PSYCHOMETRIST'S NEGATIVE.

The story which she has to tell will to most readers be absolutely incredible. Nevertheless, they would do well to read it attentively, for in the author's experiences they may find clues which may enable

them to understand some of the things which have befallen even the most prosaic among their acquaintances. One thing that must impress even the most casual reader is the extraordinary way in which things that are past come to life in her presence. It is as if there were places which are like an undeveloped negative on which pictures of long ago are waiting invisible until the proper developer is applied to them, when-hey presto Ithe photograph becomes visible. The psychic temperament, as we may call it, is in psychometry what the developer is in photography. A million of the wisest men a hundred years ago would have examined an ordinary negative and declared it was absolutely impossible that it could under any conceivable treatment produce a vivid picture of a family party all the members of which had long been dead. But to us this apparently impossible miracle is an affair of every day. We know how it is done, and we cease to marvel. Some day, when we know the laws of psychometry, we shall also know how it is done, and we shall laugh at the incredulity and the ignorance of our ancestors.

AFTER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS.

In psychometry the picture lives as in a living photograph. One of the most remarkable of Miss Bates's experiences occurred when, all ignorant of the locality, she spent a night in the room which many years before had been occupied by an undergraduate who had been madly in love with her, and whom she had refused. He had afterwards married another lady, and she had almost forgotten him when, in 1896, she spent three nights in Cambridge. Night after night her lover of long ago came to her in her dreams, reproaching her for her indifference. He kept her sleepless, twitting her with the mistake she had made in not marrying him, until at last she turned upon the unwelcome disturber of her slumbers, and gave him a piece of her mind. you have nothing better to do than to come worrying me and keeping me awake in this way, that just shows how wise I was not to marry you. And you can go." And he went. Miss Bates's explanation is that "the impression of his presence did in some way cling to the surroundings, and that my sleeping there enabled me as a sensitive to pick up this special influence, and that the memories of the past galvanised the impression into some sort of temporary astral existence."

"If

Who would be a sensitive, if to be a sensitive subjects one to such annoyances? Who, indeed! No wonder Miss Bates says that "for various good reasons' she has " carefully abstained from any attempt to cultivate, or in any way increase, the sensitiveness which is natural" to her. Even in its uncultivated state that sensitiveness seems to be extraordinary. If she sleeps in a strange room she is liable to "influences" from the various persons

who have previously occupied it. On one uncanny occasion she passed in a dream "through every detail of dying, and dying a very hard and difficult death," under very curious circumstances :

As the beating of my heart subsided, and I could think more calmly, I remembered with startling distinctness that in the very worst of the struggle I had been vainly endeavouring to say that text in the twenty-third Psalm, which begins:

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me: Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me." I could say the first part of it quite easily, but some fiendish enemy seemed bent upon preventing my saying the last sentence, and in my terrible dream, rescue and safety depended upon my getting to the end of the text.

Next day she learned from the matron of the institution-an "open-air cure" home-that a clergyman had recently died in the same room :—

Just before leaving her, it struck me that I had not yet told her about the text, so I repeated that episode, and then, for the first time, a startled look came into her eyes. She was taken by surprise, and said hastily: "That is extraordinary! I was with him when he died in the night, and he kept on asking for that text. That is not so remarkable, many might have asked for that text, but I stopped once or twice after the first sentence, and he kept on urging me: 'Say it to the end, Miss Hunter! Say it to the end!""

But

Considering how many people have died in all manner of horrible ways, the only place where a really highly developed sensitive could sleep at all would be in a lodge in some vast wilderness. perhaps with an increase of knowledge we shall learn how to close the psychic sense. At present sensitives seem to have about as bad a time of it as we should have if we had no eyelids.

A TEST MESSAGE FROM STAINTON MOSES.

Miss Bates, greatly daring, considering her sensitiveness, has done a good deal of investigating in the realm of spiritism. Some of her experiences will puzzle the most sceptical to explain. Stainton Moses, for instance, controlling Mrs. Piper, gave as a test a reference to a sister of the lady to whom he had been engaged, who had been the cause of the deepest sorrow of her life. Nobody knew of the existence of this sister. But when the message was delivered the lady burst into tears, exclaiming, "I could not speak of her to anyone; she was the cause of the greatest sorrow in my life, but no one upon earth knew this except Stainton Moses."

JULIA'S MATERIALISATION TESTED.

The many thousands who have read the "Letters of Julia" will be interested in learning that "Julia" materialised at a séance in New York. At a previous sitting the medium had given Julia's age at twentythree. Miss Bates asked the materialised form if this was correct. It shook its head, but could not articulate. A week later Miss Bates was writing to Mr. Stead. She added a postscript, "Did Julia ever tell you that she had appeared to me in New York?” Mr. Stead answered also in a postscript, "By-the-bye, Julia told me weeks ago that she had appeared

to you in New York, but that she could not give you her age on that occasion because she was not accustomed to speaking through the embodiment."

A CURIOUS EXPERIENCE.

When Miss Bates was staying at Wimbledon she was haunted by the ghost of a poor girl who had died in giving birth to an illegitimate child. Miss Bates had once been in a room with the young man who was the author of the wrong. The girl's ghost, bent on vengeance, was driving her faithless lover to suicide when Miss Bates crossed her path. She took in the evil influence and was conscious of a wrathful

and malignant presence. We have not space to tell the sequel to the story, but the episode adds a fresh. terror to the known dangers of keeping bad company.

A STORY OF A DOUBLE.

Miss Bates has been a great traveller, and in every land she has found the same strange experiences. Once when she was in India her double appeared in England to a friend in such absolutely unmistakable identity that her friend asked her, "Emmie, do tell me before you go what number you are staying at in Oxford Terrace." The double made no answer, but whisked out of the door in a great hurry, and then for the first time her friend remembered that Miss Bates was in India. As usually happens, Miss Bates had no consciousness of her instantaneous visit to London, but as very seldom happens, her friend and she wrote to each other what happened that day. Miss Bates was at that moment in Delhi, and had been much upset by the accidental death of a coolie.

MORE WONDERS YET UNTOLD.

But we must close. The book is full of narratives of similar happenings-of visions, of omens, of premonitions, and of all manner of apparitions. It is a book of real ghost stories, all of them vouched for as absolutely true by the person to whom they happened -a person who fortunately is a well-educated lady, with a scientific turn of mind, who carefully noted the events when they occurred, and verified them when verification was possible. They are wonderful certainly. But the reviewer, who has known Miss Bates for more than a dozen years, can vouch for it that, marvellous as are the glimpses of things unseen to be found within the covers of this book, there are many things still more marvellous in her experience which are known to him, but which must remain untold.

What are we to think of it all? Well, the main thing to do is to think and think and think. If there be any truth in these records of voyaging in the unknown Borderland that is so near and yet so far, then the subject is surely one that is worthy of more careful consideration than the matter-of-fact man of the world is wont to give to anything less important than the latest sporting news and the state of the money market.