In The Coasts of Illusion (Harpers) Mr. Clark B. Firestone
has produced an extraordinarily interesting and thorough work on the " travel tales which have been told in good faith from the earliest dawn of history to the middle of the nineteenth century " ; " veracious stories " of crocodile tears, mermaids, hippogrifs, unicorns, dragons, dog-headed men, monkey-tailed men, one-eyed men, " men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," men who could blanket the upper parts of their bodies with their ears," men formed like eels, who " are harmless unless provoked. They will `stand bolt upright for hours together, gazing on the boyes at their sportes, never offring to hurt any of them.' " Mr. Firestone comments : " Perhaps two-score of these imaginary tribes are better documented, and not so long ago were better known, than most of the tribes of real men and women upon the earth." As an extreme contrast to this book comes Sir William Bragg's Concerning the Nature of Things (Bell), which reminds us by the first lecture (on the atom) how much we can know that no eye-witness can ever testify to. These are Sir William's now famous Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution in 1923-24 ; they give entrancing accounts of the atom, of gases, liquids, and crystals. Many people would put Telepathy and Clairvoyance, by Herr Rudolf Tischner (Began Paul), somewhere between the two books
but honest researchers like Herr Tischner have suffered gravely from a pig-headed scepticism more absurd than the warmest credulity. He quotes, for example, a striking argument of Dr. Kispert : " We must reject this clairvoyance which is supposed to occur, as it is only possible to give a semblance of clairvoyance when you have previous know- ledge of the facts. The man who has no previous knowledge of the facts has no clairvoyant faculty." This book seems to be written with fairness and in a scientific temper.
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