up voluntarily by gazing into a crystal ball or a basin of water; (2) shell-hearing; (3) the divining-rod in its various forms; (4) sieve, ring, and Bible swinging; (5) automatic writing; (6) sand divination, widely practised in Africa; (7) trance-speaking; (8) the examination of the hand, or palmistry; (9) card-laying; (10) the interpretation of dreams; (11) the casting of lots, or sortilege; (12) the drawing of texts from the Bible or from Virgil (the 'sortes Virgilianæ' of old times); (13) the inspection of the entrails of animals freshly killed (haruspication), and the study of footprints; (14) augury by omens, such as the behaviour and cry of birds, and the meeting with ominous animals; and lastly (15 and 16), the two highly elaborated and pretentious systems of astrology (divination by the stars) and geomancy (divination by the lie of hills and rivers). In the case of astrology the stars are believed not merely to prognosticate the future, but also to influence it, and the latter is the special feature of geomancy, practised in China, where no house or other building can be erected without a certificate as to its favourable position in regard to "magic" by the professional "geomancer," who has to be paid his fee, and thus takes the place of the local government surveyor and sanitary officer of Western Europe. In the exercise of these arts of divination there is no doubt that, owing to the concentration of his attention on the thing to be inspected the operator is, in many kinds of divination, "self-hypnotized," or brought into that well-known mental condition in which the unconscious memory and other special mental processes are active, whilst an exaggerated acuteness of the senses is produced. In other cases the person who consults the "operator" may be so influenced. Hallucination of one kind and another is therefore likely to occur, and thus mystery and apparently marvellous results are not inconsistent with the good faith of the operator. But there is no reason to doubt that the modern sorcerers who make money by their pretended divinations are rogues and impostors of a particularly dangerous and injurious variety.