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548 NEW BOOKS. ever, this impersonation is weak ; Prof. Floumoy declares that though as good as or better than a play, it is " the least extraordinary of the subliminal creations of Mdlle. Smith from the point of view of lovers of the supranormal ". On the other hand, the third dream must be considered remarkable even by the most exacting. In it ' Mdlle. Smith ' acts scenes (including a suttee) from her life as Simandini, an Arab girl, who in 1401 was the eleventh but beloved wife of Sivrouka Nayaka, a Hindu Rajah of Kanara, on the Malabar coast (now reincarnated as Prof. Flournoy him- self I), who built the fortress of Tchandraguiri. The verification of this historical information (due to ' Leopold ') is rendered very difficult by our almost entire ignorance of the history of Southern India at the time mentioned. Nevertheless, Prof. Flournoy has discovered an obscure old French history of India, which states that the fortress of Tchandra- guiri was built in 1401 by the Jain Rajah Sivrouka Nayaka. Of this history he believes only two copies to exist in Geneva, and though it is extremely unlikely that 'Mdlle. Smith' should ever have got hold of either, he supposes that her subliminal consciousness must somehow have obtained cognisance of this passage, and constructed the whole dream on this foundation. Nor do the wonders of this Hindu impersona- tion stop here : ' Mdlle. Smith ' not only acts the part of an Oriental woman with perfect and dramatic propriety (a thing in itself not easy), bnt she also talks abundantly in a strange tongue, which it is very difficult for the bystanders to take down (the phonograph was tried, but proved impracticable) ! It has nevertheless been determined that it has distinctly an Indian appearance (e.g., the sound of T does not occur in it), and contains many words which the savants consulted recognised as Sanscrit, and which seemed to be appropriate to the scenes enacted. Furthermore, ' Mdlle. Smith,' in her automatic writing, occasionally intro- duces stray letters from the Devanagari alphabet in place of their French equivalents. Prof. Flournoy infers from this that she must subcon- sciously have received, and still possess, a visual impression of this script. Again, it is a curious coincidence that the scene of her dream should be placed in the one part of India into which there has been a considerable Arab immigration, whose descendants (the Moplahs) still form a distinct section of the population. As against this may be set the improbability that a Moslem girl would be married (except by capture) to a Hindu rajah, and that she should be unable to remember any Arabic while remembering so much ' Sanscrit '. It is true that ' Mdlle. Smith ' did once produce an Arabic text, but Prof. Flournoy succeeded in show- ing that her family doctor once adorned his description of a tour in Algiers, which he distributed among his friends, with Arabic texts, one of which was that produced by ' Mdlle. Smith,' although neither she nor her family appeared ever to have heard of this procedure. In this manner what might easily have been taken as a convincing and conclusive proof of the truth of reincarnation and all it implies reduces itself under Prof. Flournoy's skilful manipulation into a possible extension of ' Mdlle. Smith's' subliminal consciousness. Still enough remains to induce reflexion in the most callous sceptic, and to render further explanation or verification highly desirable. 1 1 Prof. A. A. Macdonell tells me that the words recorded all seem to be Sanscrit, with nothing Dravidian about their appearance (the Kanarese vernacular is Dravidian). Moreover though it is generally not possible to determine their grammatical form or to construe the sentences, the words always seem to be appropriate to the supposed situation. He