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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
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