The results of Mr. Taylor’s investigations are a prophecy and a lesson. A prophecy of the coming time when photographs of our friends, who have passed from earth-life, may be obtainable by the co-operation with us of spirits who desire to help us, and who will find opportunities and conditions to enable them to do so. When Mr. Stead’s proposal for a spiritual bureau becomes an accomplished fact, we may hope, and may reasonably expect, that spirit photography will be a department of it. Many strange events, which, fifty years ago, seemed as unlikely, are now of frequent occurrence. Mr. Taylor’s experiments are a lesson, as well as a prophecy. A lesson to the materialistic spirit of the age, to guide by new paths to old truths. The materialism of to-day is dogmatic and active; it claims science as its handmaid, it boasts that it has sounded the universe and found in it nothing but the material husks of existence, that all spiritual beings are nonentities—the product of diseased brains—of superstitious minds; its scholars have explored space from star to star and have learned that there is no God; that man passes at death into cold oblivion, into blank nothingness. To use the language of its leading teachers:—“Unprejudiced philosophy is _compelled_ to reject the idea of an individual immortality, and of a personal continuance after death. With the decay and dissolution of its material substratum, through which alone it has acquired a conscious existence and become a person, and upon which it was dependent, _the spirit must cease to exist_!” Again:—“Experience and daily observation teach us _that the spirit perishes_ with its material substratum; that _man dies_.” And:—“There never has been, _and never will be_, a real apparition, which could make us believe or assume that the soul of a deceased individual continues to exist: it is dead, never to return.” And once more:—“Spirits and ghosts are only seen by diseased or superstitious individuals.” [Illustration: _Mrs. Green, of Heywood (medium), and the same spirit form as on the preceding plate, but in a different attitude, and with the birds and flowers reversed. Stereoscopic photographs obtained October 21, 1893._] Undoubtedly these views are quite honestly arrived at and held by many. By some through early training. By some in the rebound from bigoted and God-dishonouring creeds. By others again in painful perplexity of mind, while trying to solve the problem of existence. But a universe without a Deity, and man without a soul, present little to boast of in the shape of the consolation they can bring to suffering humanity. Every opinion a man holds must to some extent influence his life, and the knowledge that a man will live after death ought very considerably to affect his entire character.