THE CHINA MAIL, AUGUST 28, 1939.
TO-DAY'S STRANGE STORY OF REAL PEOPLE -
THE SOUL OF A RAT
BY VINCENT TOWNE
Were you to distinctly see a shadow cast by something separating from a body at the moment of death-some- thing pentrating all barriers and pass- ing upward into space, then dis- appearing what would you say that something was?
The shadow of a soul?
Call it illusion, hallucination, phan- tom or what you will, such a pheno- menon was repeatedly produced in a laboratory at Chevy Chase, Maryland, according to Prof. Einler Gates, director.
the
I obtained the strange story from Prof. Gates' own lips twenty-five years ago, when I was a young stu- dentaf.psychology and kindred sub- jects. I still have the notes that I took at the time.
wave
"I have been experimenting with some light rays about five ovtaves above the violet-a form of energy somewhat akin to X-rays, but about as different from them as they are different from sound," Prof. Gates told me. "This new radiant force is invisible when produced in an ordinary room, but-succeeded in making it visible by projecting it upon a wall coated with a substance whose colour is altered by the action of the rays in question.
"This substance is rhodopsin-the visual purple of the retina, the seeing substance of the eye which light acts upon. This rhodopsin I extracted from the eyes of freshly slaughtered animals. I find that all known in- organic and inanimate substances are transparent to these rays. Unlike the X-rays, they will shine through metals, bones and such substances, which I can hold, between the tube emitting them and the wall covered with rhodopsin, without their casting a shadow, so to speak, or causing the colour of the wall to be changed over the corresponding area.
"I find that any living thing, how- ever, is opaque to these rays
and that it will cast a shadow as long as it retains life.
"My experiment consists of placing a live rat in a hermetically sealed bell jar held in the path of these rays and before the sensitized wall. As long as the rat remains alive it casts a shadow. When killed the animal becomes suddenly transparent.
"At the instant of its death a shadow having precisely the same shape as the animal is seen to pass
Does The Hot Weather
Wear You Down?
Prof. Gates Studying The Soul
out through the glass tube and move upward on, the sensitized wall. As soon as we can definitely prove this to other scientific men we will have demonstrated that
organism presumably not atomic, perhaps etherie and capable of passing through glass, thus leaves the atomic body at the time of death.
some
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"Now if in any way this escaping organism could be caught and made to give evidence that it still possessed mind, then we would for the first time have an inductive laboratory proof of the continuity of life after death,
"Would that be a scientific
extent of
eliminated, even to the making a comparative study of the personal equation. Scientific proof must be capable of demonstration independently of the element of per- sonal testimony.
"My explanation of the rat's opaqueness while alive is this: In any living body there are electric waves hurrying in all directions through the nerves and muscles. Light waves,. which are electric waves; cannot pene- trate such a bundle of electric im- pulses."
"Do you think, then, that the life fluid is an electric fluid, as many aver?"