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consciousness, or from life to death and return without a mental break. It is easily written, but it took fourteen years to accomplish." Mr. Fox is careful to guard us from taking too literally these anatomical details of what happened: he only claims to have described his sensations. But his views obtain some confirmation from Theosophical thought. "With one type of person," writes Major A. S. Powell, "while the sixth chakram is still attached to the pituitary body, the seventh is bent or slanted until it coincides with the atrophied organ known as the pineal gland, which, with people of this type, becomes a line of direct communication with the lower mental, without apparently passing through the intermediate astral plane in the ordinary way. This explains the emphasis sometimes laid on the development of the pineal gland. "The awakening of the etheric centre enables a man through it to leave the physical body in full consciousness, and also to re-enter it without the usual break, so that his consciousness will be continuous through night and day. "The real reason for tonsure, as practised by the Roman Church, was to leave uncovered the brahmarandra chakram, so that there might be not even the slightest hindrance in the way of psychic force which in their meditations the candidates were intended to try to arouse." He adds, later: "The organ in the brain for thought-transference, both transmitting and receiving, is the pineal gland. If anyone thinks intently on an idea, vibrations are set up in the ether which permeates the gland, thereby causing a magnetic current." In Tibetan practice, at the point of death, the escaping soul is assisted by a fracture of the tonsured skull.