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This copy of The Voice of the Silence  is intended to be an exact duplicate of the original edition of 1889. This on-line edition is not, however, a photographic reproduction. No attempt has been made to duplicate the font type, since each browser and computer will alter it anyway. It has been prepared specifically for display by the Netscape  Web Browser Version 2.01 and uses extensions to HTML 2.0 that can only be displayed properly by this browser. Furthermore the special characters have been converted into the international ISO Latin-1 format to allow computers using character sets different from the IBMTM  standard to read these characters correctly (Apple, Commodore, etc...).

By using this format, the emphasis peculiar to Blavatsky's style is possible. To make her comparisons she used regular and italic type fonts and several styles of capitalization. Some words have only the first letter in upper case; others have all. Of those that are all caps, some are all large, some are all small, and some have the first letter large and the rest small. Her style has been retained throughout

In the original edition all notes were endnotes and numbering was started from "1" for each of the three fragments. Thus there is a Glossary to Part I, to Part II, and to Part III, as indicated in the Table of Contents. Furthermore, her footnotes were indicated by superscript numbers in the text, but since they are, in this HTML text, links to the glossaries, they have been indicated by numbers in parentheses, "(#)". By clicking on the number in the text you will be moved to the corresponding number in the glossary. By clicking on the number in the glossary, you will be taken back to that number in the text.

She also placed several footnotes marked by an esterisk, "*". The asterisk has been retained, but the footnote has been inserted into the text immediately following and surrounded by curly brackets, "{* ...}". A few other notations in the original were in square brackets, "[...]", and these have been retained. Those few notes which were indicated by a single or double dagger, have been indicated herein by single asterisks, since the notation is inserted into the text and no confusion can result.

Since pagination will vary depending on many uncontrolable factors, the original page break has been recorded by inserting the original page number in square brackets at the beginning of the page. Therefore, even the endnotes are associated with the original pagination.

No corrections have been made to the original. Even "obvious errors" have been left as is. Thus, such obvious errors as Dhâsena for Dhârana (note # 41, p.80), Shagpa for Lhagpa (note # 26, p. 85), and Confession for Compassion (note *, p. 70) have been left as in the original, but the correction is inserted in square brackets in the text. Other error's, like Narjol for Naljor (note # 1, p. 87), have been left for future comments.

Some petty changes have been made, since they could not be avoided; viz., " - " for a dash, "1" for "I", and, herein, no distinction is made between before and after quotations marks. The Greek words akoustikoi  and asketai (note # 3, p. 87) were in Greek letters in the original and will be replaced with in-line graphics as soon as I can get to it.

If anyone should find a mistake, we will appreciate being notified. If your copy of the original is different in anyway, please send us a copy of the page. It is quite possible different printings are slightly different.

This text is freely available for downloading to all. You can save it in HTML format, so it may be viewed on your browser as a local file. This will save many readers much on-line time charges and make it more practical for printing on your own printers.

Your comments are greatly appreciated, and we hope this will start a trend to free distribution of all theosophical literature.

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