The office of Tadibe is generally hereditary, but individuals gifted by nature with excitable nerves and an ardent imagination not seldom desire to be initiated in these supernatural communications. No one can teach the candidate. His morbid fancy is worked upon by solitude, the contemplation of the gloomy aspect of nature, long vigils, fasts, the use of narcotics and stimulants, until he becomes persuaded that he too has seen the apparitions which he has heard of from his boyhood. He is then received as a Tadibe with many ceremonies, which are held in the silence of the night, and invested with the magic drum. Thus the Tadibe partly believes in the visions and fancies of his own overheated brain. Besides dealing with the invisible world, he does not neglect the usual arts of an expert conjuror, and knows by this means to increase his influence over his simple-minded countrymen. One of his commonest tricks is similar to that which has been practised with so much success by the Brothers Davenport. He sits down, with his hands and feet bound, on a reindeer skin stretched out upon the floor, and, the light being removed, begins to summon the ministering spirits to his aid. Strange unearthly noises now begin to be heard--bears growl, snakes hiss, squirrels rustle about the hut. At length the tumult ceases, the audience anxiously awaits the end of the spectacle, when suddenly the Tadibe, freed from his bonds, steps into the hut--no one doubting that the spirits have set him free. As barbarous as the poor wretches who submit to his guidance, the Tadibe is incapable of improving their moral condition, and has no wish to do so. Under various names--Schamans among the Tungusi, Angekoks among the Esquimaux, medicine-men among the Crees and Chepewyans, etc.--we find similar magicians or impostors assuming a spiritual dictatorship over all the Arctic nations of the Old and the New World, wherever their authority has not been broken by Christianity or Buddhism; and this dreary faith still extends its influence over at least half a million of souls, from the White Sea to the extremity of Asia, and from the Pacific to Hudson’s Bay.