Diodorus relates, that goats feeding near an opening in the ground were observed to jump about in a singular manner, and that a goatherd approaching to examine the spot was taken with a fit and prophesied. Then the priests took possession of the spot and built a temple. Plutarch tells us that the priestess was an uneducated peasant-girl, of good character and conduct. Placed upon the tripod, and affected by the exhalation, she struggled and became convulsed, and foamed at the mouth; and in that state she delivered the oracular answer. The convulsions were sometimes so violent that the Pythia died. Plutarch adds, that the answers were never in error, and that their established truth filled the temple with offerings from the whole of Greece, and from barbarian nations. Without supposing it to have been infallible, we must, I think, infer that the oracle was too often right to have been wholly a trick. The state of the Pythia was probably trance with convulsions, the same with that in which cataleptic patients have foreseen future events. The priestess was of blameless life, which suits the production of trance, the fine susceptibility of which is spoilt by irregular living. Finally, from what we know of the effects of the few gases and vapours of which the inhalation has been tried, it is any thing but improbable that one or other gaseous compound should directly induce trance in predisposed subjects. II. The performances of Zschokke are poor by the side of those of a cataleptic. But then he was not entranced. Nevertheless, an approach to that state manifested itself in his losing himself when inspecting his visiter’s brains. So again, those who had the gift of second-sight are represented to have been subject to fits of abstraction, in which they stood rapt. The præternatural gifts of Socrates were probably those of a Highland seer; in which character he is reported to have foretold the death of an officer, if he pursued a route he contemplated. The officer would not change his plans, and was met by the enemy, and slain accordingly. In all these cases, the mind seems to have gone out to seek its knowledge. Two of Mr. Williamson’s lucid patients, of whom more afterwards, told him that their minds went out at the backs of their heads, in starting on these occasions. They pointed to the lower and back part of the head, opposite to the medulla oblongata. In prophetic, and in true retrospective dreams, one may imagine the phenomena taking the same course; most likely the dreamers have slipt in their sleep into a brief lucid somnambulism. In the cases of ghosts and of dreams, coincident with the period of the death of an absent person, it seems simpler to suppose the visit to have come from the other side. So the Vampyr-ghost was probably a visit made by the free part of the mind of the patient who lay buried in death-trance. The visit was fatal to the party visited, because trance is contagious.