in the most blurred and vague of spiritist photographs, or see family resemblances in the most rudimentary doughfaced babies.  Take descriptions of persons in a passport, or in a proclamation sketching the personal appearance of a criminal.  These fit the men or women intended, but they also fit a crowd of other people.  The description given by the scryer then may come right by a fortuitous coincidence, or may be too credulously recognised.

The complex of coincidences, however, could not be attributed to chance selection out of the whole possible field of conjecture.  We must remember, too, that a series of such hits increases, at an enormous rate, the odds against accidental conjecture.  Of such mere luck I may give an example.  I was writing a story of which the hero was George Kelly, one of the ’Seven Men of Moidart.’  A year after composing my tale, I found the Government description of Mr. Kelly (1736).  It exactly tallied with my purely fanciful sketch, down to eyes, and teeth, and face, except that I made my hero ‘about six feet,’ whereas the Government gave him five feet ten.  But I knew beforehand that Mr. Kelly was a clergyman; his curious career proved him to be a person of great activity and geniality—­and he was of Irish birth.  Even a dozen such guesses, equally correct, could not suggest any powers of ‘vision,’ when so much was known beforehand about the person guessed at.  I now give cases in the experience of Miss Angus, as one may call the crystal-gazer.  The first occurred the day after she got the glass ball for the first time.  She writes: 

’I.—­A lady one day asked me to scry out a friend of whom she would think.  Almost immediately I exclaimed “Here is an old, old lady looking at me with a triumphant smile on her face.  She has a prominent nose and nut-cracker chin.  Her face is very much wrinkled, especially at the sides of her eyes, as if she were always smiling.  She is wearing a little white shawl with a black edge. But! ... she can’t be old as her hair is quite brown! although her face looks so very very old.”  The picture then vanished, and the lady said that I had accurately described her friend’s mother instead of himself; that it was a family joke that the mother must dye her hair, it was so brown and she was eighty-two years old.  The lady asked me if the vision were distinct enough for me to recognise a likeness in the son’s photograph; next day she laid several photographs before me, and in a moment, without the slightest hesitation I picked him out from his wonderful likeness to my vision!’

The inquirer verbally corroborated all the facts to me, within a week, but leaned to a theory of ‘electricity.’  She has read and confirms this account.