Apuleius in his _De Magia_,[28] quoting from Varro, says: “Trallibus de euentu Mithridatici belli magica percontatione consultantibus puerum in aqua simulacrum Mercuri contemplantem, quæ futura erant, centum sexaginta uersibus cecinisse.” In Egypt to-day the Magic Mirror is frequently consulted. A boy is engaged to gaze into a splash of water, or it may be ink or some other dark liquid poured into the palm of the hand, and therein he will assuredly see pictorially revealed the answers to those questions put to him. When a theft has been committed the Magic Mirror is invariably questioned thus. In Scandinavia the country folk, who had lost anything, would go to a diviner on a Thursday night to see in a pail of water who it was had robbed them.[29] All the world over this belief prevails, in Tahiti and among the Hawaiians, in the Malay Peninsula, in New Guinea, among the Eskimos. Similar forms of divination are those by things dropped into some liquid, a precious stone or rich amulet is cast into a cup, and the rings formed on the surface of the contents were held to predict the future. Again warm wax or molten lead is poured into a vessel of cold water, and significant letters of the alphabet may be spelled out or objects discerned from the shapes this wax or lead assumes; or again, the empty tea-cup is tilted and from the leaves, their size, shape, and the manner in which they lie, prognostications are made. This is common in England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Lithuania, whilst in Macedonia coffee-dregs are employed in the same manner. But whether the seer be Hebrew patriarch or Roman king and the divination dignified by some occult name, Ceromancy (the melting of wax), Lecanomancy (basins of water), Oinomancy (the lees of wine), or whether it be some old plaid-shawled grandam by her cottage fire peering at the leaves of her afternoon tea, the object is the same throughout the ages, for all systems of divination are merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order that the inner vision may become open. As was inevitable hydromantia lent itself to much trickery, and Hippolytus of Rome, presbyter and antipope (_ob._ _circa_ A.D. 236), in his important polemic against heretics, _Philosophumena_,[30] IV, 35, explains in detail how persons were elaborately duped by the pseudo-magicians. A room was prepared, the roof of which was painted blue to resemble the sky, there was set therein a large vessel full of water with a glass bottom, immediately under which lay a secret chamber. The inquirer gazed steadfastly into the water, and the actors walking in the secret chamber below would seem as though they were figures appearing in the water itself.