The priest now began to mutter, and finally spoke in a mixed jargon of scarcely intelligible dialects.  He now yelled, prayed, and foamed at the mouth, till in about three quarters of an hour he was exhausted and speechless.  ’But in an instant he sprang upon his feet, notwithstanding at the time he was put in it appeared impossible for him to move either his legs or arms, and shaking off his covering, as quick as if the bands with which it had been bound were burst asunder,’ he prophesied.  The Great Spirit did not say when the traders would arrive, but, just after high noon, next day, a canoe would arrive, and the people in it would tell when the traders were to appear.

Next day, just after high noon, a canoe came round a point of land about a league away, and the men in it, who had met the traders, said they would come in two days, which they did.  Carver, professing freedom from any tincture of credulity, leaves us ‘to draw what conclusions we please.’

The natural inference is ‘private information,’ about which the only difficulty is that Carver, who knew the topography and the chances of a secret messenger arriving to prompt the Jossakeed, does not allude to this theory.[38] He seems to think such successes not uncommon.

All that psychology can teach anthropology, on this whole topic of ‘possession;’ is that secondary or alternating personalities are facts in rerum natura, that the man or woman in one personality may have no conscious memory of what was done or said in the other, and that cases of knowledge said to be supernormally gained in the secondary state are worth inquiring about, if there be a chance of getting good evidence.

A few fairly respectable savage instances are given in Dr. Gibier’s ’Le Fakirisme Occidental’ and in Mr. Manning’s ‘Old New Zealand;’ but, while modern civilised parallels depend on the solitary case of Mrs. Piper (for no other case has been well observed), no affirmative conclusion can be drawn from Chinese, Maori, Zulu, or Red Indian practice.

[Footnote 1:  Among the Zulus, p. 120.]

[Footnote 2:_ Burmah_, p. 107.]

[Footnote 3:  Hodgson, Proceedings, S.P.E., vol. xiii. pt. xxxiii.  Dr. Hodgson by no means agrees with this view of the case—­the case of Mrs. Piper.]

[Footnote 4:  Prim.  Cult. ii. 184.]

[Footnote 5:  Nevius’s Demon Possession in China, a curious collection of examples by an American missionary.  The reports of Catholic missionaries abound in cases.]

[Footnote 6:  Op. cit. p. 169.]

[Footnote 7:  Putnam, 1881.]

[Footnote 8:  Nevius, p. 33.]

[Footnote 9:  Ibid. p. 35.]

[Footnote 10:  Op. cit. p. 38.]

[Footnote 11:  See ‘Fetishism and Spiritualism.’]

[Footnote 12:  Necroses et Idees Fixes.  Alcan, Paris, 1898.  This is the first of a series of works connected with the Laboratoire de Psychologie, at the Salpetritere, in Paris.]