Nor are dogs and horses the only animals considered capable of perceiving by a special instinct of their own the working of supernatural agencies. During a series of mysterious disturbances in a German village, the chickens fled in terror from the garden, and the cattle refused to enter the enclosure, when the appearances were seen. Swiss herdsmen have a number of stories concerning "feyed" places in the Alps, to which neither caress nor compulsion can induce their herds to go, even when pasture is rare everywhere else, and rich grass seems to tempt them to come to the abhorred meadows. Storks have been known to have abandoned the rooftree on which for years they had built their nest, and in every case the forsaken house was burnt during the summer. This and other peculiarities of sagacious animals have been especially noticed in Denmark, where all animals are called _synsk_, seers, when they are believed to possess the gift of second sight. ORACLES AND PROPHECIES. The highest degree of divination is the actual foretelling of events which are yet to happen. The immediate causes which awaken the gift are of the most varied character, and often very curious. Thus a young Florentine, Gasparo, who had been wounded by an arrow, and could not be relieved, began in his fearful suffering to pray incessantly, day and night; this excited him to such a degree that he finally foretold not only the name of his visitors, but also the hour at which they would come, and finally the day of his complete recovery; he also knew, by the same instinct, that later in life he would go to Rome and die there. When the iron point was at last removed from his wound, his health began to improve, and at once his prophetic gift left him and never returned. He went, however, to Rome, and really died in the Eternal City (Colquhoun, p. 333). The priests of Apollo, at Colophon, intoxicated themselves with the water of his fountain, which was as famous for bestowing the gift of prophecy as Æsculapius' well at Pergamus and the springs near his temple at Pellena. In other temples vapors were inhaled by the prophetic priests. In the prophet-schools of the Israelites music seems to have played a prominent part, for Samuel told Saul he would meet at the hill of Gad "a company of prophets coming down from the high place with a psaltery and a tabret and a pipe before them." The Jews possessed, however, also other means to aid in divining: Joseph had his cup, a custom still prevalent in the East; and the High Priest, before entering into the Holiest, put on the Thummim with its six dark jewels and the Urim with its six light-colored jewels, whereupon the brilliant sparkling of the precious stones and the rich fumes of incense combined with the awful sense of the presence of Jehovah in predisposing his mind to receive revelations from on high. The false prophets of Baal, on the contrary, tried to produce like effects by bloody means: "They cut