These things are as well known to contemporary savages as they were to the classical people of Lucian’s day, or as they are, doubtless, to the secretaries of the Society for Psychical Research. Once more, we ought to notice the “well-authenticated” modern ghost story, which on examination proves to be really a parallel to the William Tell myth, and to recur in many ages, always attached to different names, and provided with fresh properties. To look into these ghost stories cannot be wholly idle. Apparently there is either some internal groundwork of fact at the bottom of a belief which savages share with Fellows of the Royal Society, or liability to certain recurring hallucinations must be inherited by civilised man from his untutored ancestors, or the mythopœic faculty, to use no harder term, is common to all stages of culture. As to habits of hasty inference and false reasoning, these, of course, were bequeathed to us by our pre-scientific parents, and these, with our own vain hopes and foolish fears, afford the stuff for most ghosts and ghost stories. The whole topic, in the meanwhile, has only been touched at either end, so to speak. The anthropologists have established their own theory of the origin of a belief in ghosts, without asking whether the actual appearance of apparitions may not have helped to start or confirm that belief. The friends of psychical research have collected modern stories of the actual appearance of apparitions without paying much attention, as far as I am aware, to their parallels among the most backward races, or to their mediæval and classical variants.