Dr. Callaway gives the Zulu practice, where the chief ’sees what will happen by looking into the vessel.’[5] The Shamans of Siberia and Eastern Russia employ the same method.[6] The case of the Inca, Yupanqui, is very curious.  ’As he came up to a fountain he saw a piece of crystal fall into it, within which he beheld a figure of an Indian in the following shape ...  The apparition then vanished, while the crystal remained.  The Inca took care of it, and they say that he afterwards saw everything he wanted in it.’[7]

Here, then, we find the belief that hallucinations can be induced by one or other form of crystal-gazing, in ancient Peru, on the other side of the continent among the Huille-che, in Fez, in Madagascar, in Siberia, among Apaches, Hurons, Iroquois, Australian black fellows, Maoris, and in Polynesia.  This is assuredly a wide range of geographical distribution.  We also find the practice in Greece (Pausanias, VII. xxi. 12), in Rome (Varro), in Egypt, and in India.

Though anthropologists have paid no attention to the subject, it was of course familiar to later Europe.  ‘Miss X’ has traced it among early Christians, in early Councils, in episcopal condemnations of specularii, and so to Dr. Dee, under James VI.; Aubrey; the Regent d’Orleans in St. Simon’s Memoirs; the modern mesmerists (Gregory, Mayo) and the mid-Victorian spiritualists, who, as usual, explained the phenomena, in their prehistoric way, by ‘spirits[8].’  Till this lady examined the subject, nobody had thought of remarking that a belief so universal had probably some basis of facts, or nobody if we except two professors of chemistry and physiology, Drs. Gregory and Mayo.  Miss X made experiments, beginning by accident, like George Sand, when a child.

The hallucinations which appear to her eyes in ink, or crystal, are: 

  1.  Revived memories ’arising thus, and thus only, from the subconscious
  strata;’

  ’2.  Objectivation of ideas or images—­(a) consciously or (b)
  unconsciously—­in the mind of the percipient;

  ’3.  Visions, possibly telepathic or clairvoyant, implying acquirement of
  knowledge by supernormal means.’[9]

The examples given of the last class, the class which would be so useful to a priest or medicine-man asked to discover things lost, are of very slight interest.[10]

Since Miss X drew attention to this subject, experiments have proved beyond doubt that a fair percentage of people, sane and healthy, can see vivid landscapes, and figures of persons in motion, in glass balls and other vehicles.  This faculty Dr. Parish attributes to ‘dissociation,’ practically to drowsiness.  But he speaks by conjecture, and without having witnessed experiments, as will be shown later.  I now offer a series of experiments with a glass ball, coming under my own observation, in which knowledge was apparently acquired in no ordinary way.  Of the absence of fraud I am personally convinced, not only by the characters of all concerned, but by the nature of the circumstances.  That adaptive memory did not later alter the narratives, as originally told, I feel certain, because they were reported to me, when I was not present, within less than a week, precisely as they are now given, except in cases specially noted.