as are
the Chinese in divination, and numerous as are their superstitions, we
do not find, _pace_ Oliver Goldsmith, that the mirror occupies any
prominent place in their magic.

One of the most famous dealers in catoptromancy (divination by mirror)
in this country was Dr. John Dee, who flourished about the middle of the
sixteenth century. He had a speculum called the Shew Stone, and
sometimes the Holy Stone, with which he divined by the aid of a medium
named Kelly. This Kelly was a notoriously bad character, so his example
does not carry out the popular idea that the seer must be a stainless
child, or some absolutely pure-minded being. Dr. Dee professed to have a
number of regular spirit-visitors, whom he described with much
circumstantial minuteness, and thus his mirror-magic seems to have
possessed more of the character of spiritualistic manifestations than
of the usual Oriental crystallomancy.

The famous Cagliostro--Prince of Scoundrels, as Carlyle called him--used
a bottle of pure water, into which he directed a child to gaze, with
results which were not always satisfactory.

The Orientalist, Lane, published some sixty years ago, or more, a
circumstantial narrative of an experience he had with an Egyptian
magician, along with Mr. Salt, a British Consul. Invocations were
liberally used, in order to summon the two genii of the magician, and
verses were recited from the Koran, in order that the eyes of the
medium--a boy--should be opened in a supernatural manner. The magician
selected one at random from a group of boys, and drew in the palm of the
boy's right hand a magic square, inscribed with Arabic figures. He then
poured ink into the centre, and told the boy to gaze fixedly, while he
himself proceeded to drop more written invocations, on slips of paper,
into a chafing-dish.

For some time the boy saw nothing but the reflection of the magician,
and then he began to describe various scenes. At last Lane asked that
Lord Nelson should be called up, and the boy said that he saw a man in
dark-blue clothes, with his left arm across his breast. It was explained
that the boy saw things as in a mirror, and that Nelson's empty right
sleeve worn across the breast naturally appeared in the glass as the
left arm. Now, the boy may have heard of Nelson, but could scarcely have
seen him, though the figure of so famous a man must have been familiar
to the magician. Hypnotism has, therefore, been suggested as the
explanation o