and Colonel Felix, caused among the curious.  A boy, selected by these English gentlemen, saw and described Shakspeare, and Colonel Felix’s brother, who had lost an arm.  The ceremonies of fumigation, and the preliminary visions of flags, and a sultan, are not necessary in modern crystal-gazing.  Scott made inquiries at Malta, and wished to visit Alexandria.  He was attracted, doubtless, by the resemblance to Dr. Dee’s tales of his magic ball, and to the legends of his own Aunt Margaret’s Mirror.  The Quarterly Review (No. 117, pp. 196-208) offers an explanation which explains nothing.  The experiments of Mr. Lane were tolerably successful, those of Mr. Kinglake, in Eothen, were amusingly the reverse.  Dr. Keate, the flogging headmaster of Eton, was described by the seer as a beautiful girl, with golden hair and blue eyes.  The modern explanation of successes would apparently be that the boy does, occasionally, see the reflection of his interrogator’s thoughts.

In a paper in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (part xiv.), an anonymous writer gives the results of some historical investigation into the antiquities of crystal-gazing.  The stories of cups, ‘wherein my lord divines,’ like Joseph, need not necessarily indicate gazing into the deeps of the cup.  There were other modes of using cups and drops of wine, not connected with visions.  At Patrae, in Greece, Pausanias describes the dropping of a mirror on to the surface of a well, the burning of incense, and the vision of the patient who consults the oracle in the deeps of the mirror. {216a} A Christian Father asserts that, in some cases, a basin with a glass bottom was used, through which the gazer saw persons concealed in a room below, and took them for real visions. {216b} In mirror-magic (catoptromancy), the child seer’s eyes were bandaged, and he saw with the top of his head!  The Specularii continued the tradition through the Middle Ages, and, in the sixteenth century Dr. Dee ruined himself by his infatuation for ‘show-stones,’ in which Kelly saw, or pretended to see, visions which Dr. Dee interpreted.  Dee kept voluminous diaries of his experiments, part of which is published in a folio by Meric Casaubon.  The work is flighty, indeed crazy; Dee thought that the hallucinations were spirits, and believed that his ‘show-stones’ were occasionally spirited away by the demons.  Kelly pretended to hear noises in the stones, and to receive messages.

In our own time, while many can see pictures, few know what the pictures represent.  Some explain them by interpreting the accompanying ‘raps,’ or by ‘automatic writing’.  The intelligence thus conveyed is then found to exist in county histories, newspapers, and elsewhere, a circumstance which lends itself to interpretation of more sorts than one.  Without these very dubious modes of getting at the meaning of the crystal pictures, they remain, of course, mere picturesque hallucinations.  The author of