Within the last few years, we have had accounts of a magician in Egypt, first described in a valuable work on that country by Mr. Lane, which produced an extraordinary impression. The magician, it was said, caused a boy to see certain persons called for, in a little ink, placed in his hand, in the centre of a double magic square, somewhat like the figure. One of the most profound writers of the age even wrote: “There will be no lack of confidence to pronounce; and the authority so pronouncing will assume the name and tone of philosophy, that there was nothing more in the whole matter than artful contrivance; that there was no intervention of an intelligent agency extraneous to that of the immediate ostensible agent. But can this assumption be made on any other ground than a prior general assumption that there is no such preternatural intervention in the system of the world? But how to _know_ that there is not? The negative decision pronounced in confident ignorance, is a conceited impertinence, which ought to be rebuked by that philosophy whose oracles it is affecting to utter. For what any man knows, or can know, there may be such intervention. That it is not incompatible with the constitution of the world, is an unquestionable fact with the unsophisticated believers in the sacred records. And not a few occurrences in later history have totally defied every attempt at explanation in any other way.”[A] And yet sir Gardiner Wilkinson, who subsequently travelled in Egypt, and visited the magician, says:--