should think that most people must be somewhat puzzled to decide in regard to certain scenes and circumstances that live in their memory, whether the images are the result of their waking or sleeping experience. Although by no means a dreamer, and without the most remote approximation to any faculty of presentiment, I know this is the case with myself. I remember also a very curious effect being produced upon me, when I was abroad, some years ago, from eating the unwholesome bread to which we were reduced, in consequence of a scarcity. Some five or six times a day I was seized with a sort of vertigo, during which I seemed to pass through certain scenes, and was conscious of certain words, which appeared to me to have a strange connection, with either some former period of my life, or else some previous state of existence. The words and the scenes were on each occasion precisely the same: I was always aware of that, and I always made the strongest efforts to grasp and retain them in my memory, but I could not. I only knew that the thing _had been_; the words and the scenes were gone. I seemed to pass momentarily into another sphere and back again. This was purely the result of disorder; but, like a dream, it shows how we may be perceptive of that which is not, and which never may be; rendering it, therefore, possible to conceive that a spirit may be equally perceptive of that which shall be. I am very far from meaning to imply that these examples remove the difficulty: they do not explain the thing; they only show somewhat the mode of it. But it must be remembered that when physiologists pretend to settle the whole question of apparitions by the theory of spectral illusions, they are exactly in the same predicament. They can supply examples of similar phenomena; but how a person, perfectly in his senses, should receive the spectral visits of, not only friends, but strangers, when he is thinking of no such matter—or by what process, mental or optical, the figures are conjured up—remains as much a mystery as before a line was written on the subject. All people and all ages have believed, more or less, in prophetic dreams, presentiments, and apparitions; and all historians have furnished examples of them. That the truths may be frequently distorted and mingled with fable, is no argument against those traditions; if it were, all history must be rejected on the same plea. Both the Old and New Testaments furnish numerous examples of these phenomena; and although Christ and the apostles reproved all the superstitions of the age, these persuasions are not included in their reprehensions.