who reject the supernormal phenomena will also, perhaps, be, let us say, incomplete.  Religion will have been, in part, developed out of facts, perhaps inconsistent with materialism in its present dogmatic form.  To put it less trenchantly, and perhaps more accurately, the alleged facts ’are not merely dramatically strange, they are not merely extraordinary and striking, but they are “odd” in the sense that they will not easily fit in with the views which physicists and men of science generally give us of the universe in which we live’ (Mr. A.J.  Balfour, President’s Address, ‘Proceedings,’ S.P.R. vol. x. p. 8, 1894).

As this is the case, it might seem to be the business of Anthropology, the Science of Man, to examine, among other things, the evidence for the actual existence of those alleged unusual and supernormal phenomena, belief in which is given as one of the origins of religion.

To make this examination, in the ethnographic field, is almost a new labour.  As we shall see, anthropologists have not hitherto investigated such things as the ‘Fire-walk’ of savages, uninjured in the flames, like the Three Holy Children.  The world-wide savage practice of divining by hallucinations induced through gazing into a smooth deep (crystal-gazing) has been studied, I think, by no anthropologist.  The veracity of ‘messages’ uttered by savage seers when (as they suppose) ‘possessed’ or ‘inspired’ has not been criticised, and probably cannot be, for lack of detailed information.  The ‘physical phenomena’ which answer among savages to the use of the ‘divining rod,’ and to ‘spiritist’ marvels in modern times, have only been glanced at.  In short, all the savage parallels to the so-called ‘psychical phenomena’ now under discussion in England, America, Germany, Italy, and France, have escaped critical analysis and comparison with their civilised counterparts.

An exception among anthropologists is Mr. Tylor.  He has not suppressed the existence of these barbaric parallels to our modern problems of this kind.  But his interest in them practically ends when he has shown that the phenomena helped to originate the savage belief in ‘spirits,’ and when he has displayed the ‘survival’ of that belief in later culture.  He does not ask ‘Are the phenomena real?’ he is concerned only with the savage philosophy of the phenomena and with its relics in modern spiritism and religion.  My purpose is to do, by way only of ebauche, what neither anthropology nor psychical research nor psychology has done:  to put the savage and modern phenomena side by side.  Such evidence as we can give for the actuality of the modern experiences will, so far as it goes, raise a presumption that the savage beliefs, however erroneous, however darkened by fraud and fancy, repose on a basis of real observation of actual phenomena.