Seeing the invisible Author:James Coates Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II INVISIBLE FORCES AND EMANATIONS When the Prince of Wales was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society, in March 1902, on the occasion of a brillia... more »nt and profound lecture on " Radio-active Bodies," by a celebrated Frenchman, M. Henri Becquerel, Professor Sir William Crookes took the opportunity to assure the newly elected Fellow, the Society, and the brilliant assembly of that occasion, that " we are now on the borderland between force and matter." And this appears to be true in physics. And it is also true in a psychical sense, for Sir William Crookes is, and has been, with a host of other able men, standing on the borderland of "intelligent psychic force," beyond what we recognise as matter, which is, after all, the form of things externalised to our imperfect senses; and by such aids to these external senses as the well-known apparatus of physics, and the humble and perhaps better-known instrument, the camera, has the borderland been reached. The distinguished French savant informed his audience that his discoveries in " radio-active bodies "were made five years ago, and during these investigations he had discovered three new elements which suggested entirely new ideas of the constitution of matter and energy, or that form of energy known as electricity. Uranium, discovered in 1789, has long since shown peculiar properties in its salts when exposed to the light. Some of these salts are employed in photography, and others produce that beautiful yellow tint in what is called by decorators uranium glass. The lecturer said:— " At the commencement of the year of 1896, in carrying out some experiments with the salts of uranium, the exceptional optical properties of which I had been studying for some time, I observed that these salts emitted an invisible radiation,...« less