by young men holding sticks in their hands.  After a sufficient amount of incantation, dancing, and convulsions, the sticks became possessed, the men ‘can hardly hold them,’ and are dragged after them in the required directions. {50a} These examples are analogous to the use of the Divining Rod, which is probably moved unconsciously by honest ‘dowsers’; ’sometimes they believe that they can hardly hold it’.  These are cases of movement of objects in contact with human muscles, and are therefore not at all mysterious in origin.  A regular case of movement without contact was reported from Thibet, by M. Tscherepanoff, in 1855.  The modern epidemic of table-turning had set in, when M. Tscherepanoff wrote thus to the Abeille Russe:  {50b} ’The Lama can find stolen objects by following a table which flies before him’.  But the Lama, after being asked to trace an object, requires an interval of some days, before he sets about finding it.  When he is ready he sits on the ground, reading a Thibetan book, in front of a small square table, on which he rests his hands.  At the end of half an hour he rises and lifts his hands from the surface of the table:  presently the table also rises from the ground, and follows the direction of his hand.  The Lama elevates his hand above his head, the table reaches the level of his eyes:  the Lama walks, the table rushes before him in the air, so rapidly that he can scarcely keep up with its flight.  The table then spins round, and falls on the earth, the direction in which it falls, indicates that in which the stolen object is to be sought.  M. Tscherepanoff says that he saw the table fly about forty feet, and fall.  The stolen object was not immediately discovered, but a Russian peasant, seeing the line which the table took, committed suicide, and the object was found in his hut.  The date was 1831.  M. Tscherepanoff could not believe his eyes, and searched in vain for an iron wire, or other mechanism, but could find nothing of the sort.  This anecdote, if it does not prove a miracle, illustrates a custom. {51}

As to clairvoyance among savages, the subject is comparatively familiar.  Montezuma’s priests predicted the arrival of the Spaniards long before the event.  On this point, in itself well vouched for, Acosta tells a story which illustrates the identity of the ‘astral body,’ or double, with the ordinary body.  In the witch stories of Increase Mather and others, where the possessed sees the phantasm of the witch, and strikes it, the actual witch proves to be injured.  Story leads to story, and Mr. Thomas Hardy somewhere tells one to this effect.  A farmer’s wife, a woman of some education, fell asleep in the afternoon, and dreamed that a neighbour of hers, a woman, was sitting on her chest.  She caught at the figure’s arm in her dream, and woke.  Later in the day she met her neighbour, who complained of a pain in the arm, just where the farmer’s wife seized it in her dream.