sure-seekers among the Huille-che
'look earnestly' for what they want to find 'into a smooth slab of black
stone, which I suppose to be basalt.'[3]

The kindness of Monsieur Lefebure enables me to give another example from
Madagascar.[4] Flacourt, describing the Malagasies, says that they
_squillent_ (a word not in Littre), that is, divine by crystals, which
'fall from heaven when it thunders,' Of course the rain reveals the
crystals, as it does the flint instruments called 'thunderbolts' in many
countries. 'Lorsqu'ils squillent, ils ont une de ces pierres au coing de
leurs tablettes, disans qu'elle a la vertu de faire faire operation a leur
figure de geomance.' Probably they used the crystals as do the Apaches. On
July 15 a Malagasy woman viewed, whether in her crystal or otherwise, two
French vessels which, like the Spanish fleet, were 'not in sight,' also
officers, and doctors, and others aboard, whom she had seen, before their
return to France, in Madagascar. The earliest of the ships did not arrive
till August 11.

Dr. Callaway gives the Zulu practice, where the chief 'sees what will
happen by looking into the vessel.'[5] The Shamans of Siberia and Eastern
Russia employ the same method.[6] The case of the Inca, Yupanqui, is very
curious. 'As he came up to a fountain he saw a piece of crystal fall into
it, within which he beheld a figure of an Indian in the following
shape ... The apparition then vanished, while the crystal remained. The
Inca took care of it, and they say that he afterwards saw everything he
wanted in it.'[7]

Here, then, we find the belief that hallucinations can be induced by one
or other form of crystal-gazing, in ancient Peru, on the other side of the
continent among the Huille-che, in Fez, in Madagascar, in Siberia, among
Apaches, Hurons, Iroquois, Australian black fellows, Maoris, and in
Polynesia. This is assuredly a wide range of geographical distribution. We
also find the practice in Greece (Pausanias, VII. xxi. 12), in Rome
(Varro), in Egypt, and in India.

Though anthropologists have paid no attention to the subject, it was of
course familiar to later Europe. 'Miss X' has traced it among early
Christians, in early Councils, in episcopal condemnations of _specularii_,
and so to Dr. Dee, under James VI.; Aubrey; the Regent d'Orleans
in St. Simon's Memoirs; the modern mesmerists (Gregory, Mayo) and the
mid-Victorian spiritualists, who, as usual, explained the phenomena, in
their prehisto