In answer to inquiries as to his authority for this narrative, Mr. Fenton writes: 

’December 18, 1883.

’I knew all the parties concerned well, and it is quite true, valeat quantum, as the lawyers say.  Incidents of this sort are not infrequent among the Maoris.

’F.D.  FENTON, ’Late Chief Judge, Native Law-Court of N.Z.’

Here is a somewhat analogous example from Tierra del Fuego: 

‘Jemmy Button was very superstitious’ (says Admiral Fitzroy, speaking of a Fuegian brought to England).  ’While at sea, on board the “Beagle,” he said one morning to Mr. Bynoe that in the night some man came to the side of his hammock and whispered in his ear that his father was dead.  He fully believed that such was the case,’ and he was perfectly right....  ’He reminded Bennett of the dream.’[11]

Mr. Darwin also mentions this case, a coincidental auditory hallucination.

I have found no other savage cases quite to the point.  This is, undeniably, ‘a puir show for Kirkintilloch,’ a meagre collection of savage death-wraiths, but it may be so meagre by reason of want of research, or of lack of records, travellers usually pooh-poohing the benighted superstitions of the heathen, or fearing to seem superstitious if they chronicle instances.  However few the instances, they are, undeniably, exact parallels to those recorded in civilised life.

In filling up the lacuna in Mr. Tylor’s anthropological work, in asking questions as to the proportion between phantasms of the living which coincide with a crisis in the experience of the person seen, and those which do not, it is obviously necessary to reject all evidence of people who were ill, or anxious, or overworked, or in poignant grief at the time of the hallucination.  It will be seen later that neither grief nor amatory passion (dominating the association of our ideas as they do) beget many phantasms.  Our business, however, is with the false perceptions of persons trustworthy, as far as we know, sane, healthy, not usually visionary, and in an unperturbed state of mind.

There remains a normal cause of subjective hallucinations, expectancy.  This appears to be a real cause of hallucination or, at least, of illusion.  Waiting for the sound of a carriage you may hear it often before it comes, you taking other sounds for that which you desire.  Again, in an inquiry embracing 17,000 people, the S.P.R. collected thirteen cases of an hallucinatory appearance of one person to another who was expecting his arrival.  Once more, it is very conceivable that a trifle, the accidental opening of a door, a noise of a familiar kind in an unfamiliar place, may touch the brain into originating an hallucination of a person passing through the door, or of the place where the sound now heard used once to be familiar.  Expectancy, again, and nervousness, might doubtless cause an hallucination to a person who felt uncomfortable in a house with a name to be