From the exhibition
Weird Tales, Vol. II, No. 2
· September 1923

This issue of *Weird Tales* features three science fiction and supernatural stories. "The People of the Comet" by Austin Hall, a serialized novel, depicts a visitor from an ancient polar civilization describing Earth's prehistoric habitation concentrated at the poles during a cooler planetary epoch, with references to lunar civilization and Sansar ancestry. "The Black Patch" by Julian Kilman is briefly advertised as an odd tale. "The Soul of Peter Andrus" by Hubert La Due concerns unspecified Oriental philosophy and tragedy. "The Case of Dr. Johnstone" by Burton Peter Thom presents a scientist who experiments with soul transference using electrodes and a mysterious radioactive battery, successfully swapping the consciousness of an ape and a man. When the apparatus is destroyed during their ensuing struggle, the bestial man-inhabited ape body strangles the ape-inhabited man's body to death, leaving the narrator as witness to Johnstone's horrifying proof of the soul's tangible existence.
Public domain (pre-1929), restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain