A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IlYTHING more fascinatingly interesting than the Presidential address given by Dr. Gilbert Murray at the 70th annual meeting of the Society for Psychical Research on Wednesday it would be hard indeed to imagine. To Dr. Murray's invariable charm of phrase was added his own wide and remarkable experience as a telepathic percipient. Of all the many examples he quoted perhaps the most remarkable was the experience of a lady he knew well, who on September 3rd or 4th, 1898, saw the phantasm of a soldier friend who was serving with Kitchener in Egypt and who said: " I am going on on the I lth." The battle of Omdurman had been fought on the 2nd. The friend survived the battle but died a day or two later. The reference to the I lth was a mystery, till it was discovered that he had in fact gone forward with the 11th (Hussars)—which was not his regiment; what the phantasm said must have been misheard. Of Dr. Murray's own experiences perhaps the most interesting was one that counted as a partial failure (as against many almost startling successes). A lady, with Dr. Murray out of the room, thought of " our drinking together of the Castalian Spring at Delphi." He came back and spoke of a sense of tragedy—which obviously had nothing to do with the Castalian spring. But his daughter Rosalind, with whom he has always been in particularly close rapport, was to have asked, and already had in her mind, the next question, about the recent tragic death of a friend. That must have seized on Gilbert Murray's mind and superseded the other and prior question by a less intimate acquaintance. (It may be added that to stand at a reading-desk for fully seventy minutes is in itself no mean achievement for a man of 86.)
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