magical incantations. The doctor himself was lucky enough to buy an
old magical crystal in which some boys, after long staring, saw
persons unknown to themselves, but known to the professor, and also
persons known to neither. A little girl, casually picking up a
crystal ball, cried, 'There's a ship in it, with its cloth all in
rags. Now it tumbles down, and a woman is working at it, and holds
her head in her hand.' This is a very fair example of a crystal
fancy picture. The child's mother, not having heard what the child
said, saw the same vision (p. 165). But this is a story at third
hand. The doctor has a number of cases, and held that crystal
possesses an 'odylic' quality. But a ball of glass serves just as
well as a ball of crystal, and is much less expensive.
Children are naturally visionaries, and, as such, are good subjects
for experiment. But it may be a cruel, and is a most injudicious
thing, to set children a-scrying. Superstition may be excited, or
the half-conscious tendency to deceive may be put in motion.
Socrates and Joan of Arc were visionaries as children. Had Joan's
ears been soundly boxed, as Robert de Baudricourt advised, France
might now be an English province. But they were not boxed, happily
for mankind. Certainly much that is curious may be learned by any
one who, having the confidence of a child, will listen to his, or
her, accounts of spontaneous visions. The writer, as a boy, knew a
child who used to lie prone on the grass watching fairies at play in
the miniature forest of blades and leaves. This child had a
favourite familiar whom he described freely, but as his remarks were
received with good-humoured scepticism, no harm came to him. He
would have made a splendid scryer, still, 'I speak of him but
brotherly,' his revelations would have been taken with the largest
allowances. If scrying, on examination, proves to be of real
psychological interest, science will owe another debt to folklore,
to the folk who kept alive a practice which common-sense would not
deign even to examine.
THE SECOND SIGHT
The Gillie and the fire-raising. Survival of belief in second
sight. Belief in ancient Greece and elsewhere. Examples in
Lapland. Early evidence as to Scotch second sight. Witches burned
for this gift. Examples among the Covenanting Ministers. Early
investigations by English authors: Pepys, Aubrey, Boyle, Dicky
Steele, De Foe, Martin, Kirk, Frazer, Dr. Johnson. Theory of
visions as caused by Fairies. Modern example of Miss H. Theory of
Frazer of Tiree (1700). 'Revived impressions of sense.' Examples.
Agency of Angels. Martin. Modern cases. Bodily condition of the
seer. Not epileptic. The second-sighted Minister. The visionary
Beadle. Transference of vision by touch. Conclusion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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