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Admiral William Folgers Interest in the World of the Supernatural ADD TO LITTLE KNOWN facts about Nantucket that, for public libraries in towns of Nantucket's size, the Atheneum houses perhaps the best collection in the United States of books on theosophy, spiritualism and psychical research. Add the further and still more astonishing- fact, that the Atheneum and Nantucket owe this collection mainly to that notable benefactor of the Nan tucket Historical Association, the rugged, outspoken, uncompro mising Admiral William M. Folger. From inspection of the Admiral's portrait (hanging in the Peter Foulger Museum) none would dream that he had been an eager student of the occult. Few dreamed this who knew him in life, whether during or after his service in the United States Navy. In the Navy he is remembered as a rigid disciplinarian of uncommon common sense. By most of the associates of his re tirement, particularly those in his winter home, the Algonquin Club of Boston, Admiral Folger is recalled for his political con servatism, his zeal for the Navy, and his interest in business and financial developments. But if, in the reading room of his club, the Admiral was wont to discourse fluently and forcefully on current themes of worldly appeal, in the seclusion of his club bedroom and of the library in his Cornish summer home, the other-worldly rather than the worldly claimed his thoughts. He was not of the dull brotherhood intent only on the material and transitory. Wise enough to sense the illogicality of limiting human life to its earthly span, Admiral Folger was aflame with curiosity to learn what lay beyond that span. Hence, many years before his death, he began to collect and read and ponder all manner of books relating to the soul and its persistence after the crumbling of the body. The range of his reading was wide indeed, from books of little or no scientific value to the most scholarly of works. Today the Atheneum has them all, and they form a goodly part of the twenty-six hundred volumes that came to Nantucket under the terms of Admiral Folger's will. That magnum opus of really scientific psychical research, F. W. H. Myers' wondrous Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, is among them. So is that learned work by my friend Henry Holt, On the Cosmic, Relations, a work which my other friend, the philosopher Josiah Royce, praised to me as The most judicious book on the subject since Myers' Human Personal ity. Along with these one finds such glaring contrasts as Evelyn. Underbill's compact Man and the Supernatural and Madame Bla-
