The so-called modern manifestations of spiritualism, as table-turning and direct spirit-writing, have been practiced in China from time immemorial; they have been known there at least from the days of Lao-tse, and he was an aged man when Confucius was a youth, between five and six centuries before the Christian era. Those who have read the travels in Thibet of the two Lazarite monks, Huc and Gabet, will recall many illustrations of spiritualism from their pages; and here, too, as in China, these practices date from a very remote time. M. Tscherpanoff published, in 1858, at St. Petersburg, the results of his investigations with the Lamas of Thibet. He attests (having been a witness in one or two cases) "that the Lamas, when applied to for the recovery of stolen or hidden things, take a little table, put one hand on it, and after nearly half an hour the table is lifted up by an invisible power, and is (with the hand of the Lama always on it) carried to the place where the thing in question is to be found, whether in or out of doors, where it drops, generally indicating exactly the spot where the article is to be found." Mesmerism is not new. Amongst Egyptian sculptures are people in the various attitudes which mesmerism in modern times induces. The Hebrews knew something of this science, for Baalam manifestly consulted a clairvoyant--a man in a "trance with his eyes open." The Greeks also had a knowledge of it. In Taylor's Plato it is said a man appeared before Aristotle in the Lyceum, who could read on one side of a brazen shield what was written on the other. The Romans were not ignorant of it, for Plautus, in one of his plays, asks, "What, and although I were by my continual slow touch to make him as if asleep?"