VAMPIRES 
399 
true." No words have ever impressed me more deeply; they 
sank right in and were illuminated by daily experience until 
they had justified themselves a thousand times over. 
That goes for Vampires! 
In 1916, I was the first trained scien tific observer to record 
the appearance 
commonly 
called "St. 
Elmo's fire" 
indiscreetly revealing this fact in a letter to the New Yark 
Times. I was pestered for the next six months and more by 
professors of physics (and the rest) from all over the U.S.A. 
The existence of the phenomenon had been doubted until 
then because of certain theoretical difficulties. That, sister, is 
the point. If a statement is hard to reconcile with the whole 
body of evidence on the laws of the subject, it is rightly 
received with suspicion. 
A moment with great Huxley, and his illustration of the 
centaur in Piccadilly, reported to him (he humorously 
hypothesizes) by Professor Owen. What occasions Huxley's 
doubt, and inspires the questions by means of which he seeks 
to confirm or to discredit it? Just this, no more: here is the 
head and torso of a man fitted to the shoulders of a horse; 
how are the mechanical adjustments effected? 
In the same strain, he pointed out that for an angel to have 
practicable wings as in Mediaeval pictures, the breast-bone 
would have to stand out some five feet in front of the body! 
(The poor fellow, of course, was densely ignorant of the 
mechanics of the Astral Plane. I am, for once, "on the side of 
the angels. ")1 
Am I digressing again? no, not really; I am just putting 
forward a case for keeping an open mind on the subject of 
Vampires, even of the Clan Dracula. 
How then is the subject in any way important to you? 
Thus, that there are actually people running about allover 
the place, who actually possess, and exercise, faculties similar 
1. For all that, they move without flapping them. As Swinburne says: "SWift 
without feet, and flying without wings."