The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE EQUINOX money expended in burying her would therefore have to come ultimately out of his own pocket, which is not very nice to think of, when you are 78 years old, rich and honoured, and your last near relative is lying dead in her house. I think possibly that he may have paid a few shillings for a cheap coffin, for the subject seems to worry him very much. Two years later he is trying to swindle this nephew aforesaid out of some property, and one of the arguments which he uses is, that if he gets this money to which he has no right, he will be able to have a stone put on the grave of his sister. I hope the readers of THE Egurnox have been ignorant hitherto that there are any people like this Mr. Bishop; that they imagine the peasants in Zola’s La Terre to be mostly imaginary :—not that Zola’s peasants are as disgusting as Mr. Bishop. He is certainly a very strong argument against evolution, though his book is not. After wearing out his sister Ada, finding him- self faced with this expense of this stenographer aforesaid, he decided that it would be cheaper to get married. So he went to Llandudno; and, rather like Abraham when he found the ram caught in the thicket by its horns, he found a cow caught in the Children’s Special Service Mission by her feet, which were exceptionally large, and took her as wife in name, and secretary and general ser- vant in function. This female, however, developed an unsuspected quality. She made him shave, and Mr. Bishop, who had been going about London for forty years looking like a most venerable old gentleman, was seen to be a monkey. He looked like a monkey so much that the local zoologists used to frequent the neigh- bourhood of his house on Sunday afternoon. We have also seen that he thinks like a monkey, the god whom he has made in his own image being more ferocious than a gorilla, and far less intelligent. What then are the differences between Mr. Bishop and a monkey? They are not obvious, and I do not think that any man of science will disagree that it is better to leave it to the monkeys to discover them. But if they insist that he is a Nuctanthropus, we must try again, and see if we cannot class him among the cockroaches. There is a great gambit in what may be called by history the olfactory argument. H. Sapiens. Tue Dorts Case oF MuttrpLe Personatity. By WALTER F. Prince, Ph.D., and James H. Hystop, Ph.D. Proceedings of the American Society for Psy- chical Research, Vols. IX, X, XI. 1915; 1916; 1917. Three volumes; price $20.00. Herz is a nice little piece of reading for the occult student—-some two thousand pages, weighing Lord knows how many pounds! And it contains some stuff. Volumes I and II are by Dr. Prince, and deal with the psychology of the case,— its genesis and cure; Volume III is by Hyslop, and takes it up—as we might have supposed—from the “spiritualistic” point of view, and endeavours to prove that the various personalities are not such at all, in reality, but probably “spirits,” who 286