ed. Such is the essence of the learned Jesuit's
work, and the strange thing is that, in an age of science, people
are still discussing his problems, and, stranger still, that the
reported phenomena remain the same.

That the Church in the case of Thyraeus, and many others; that
medical science, in the person of Wierus (b. 1515); that law, in the
book of Bouchel, should have gravely canvassed the topic of haunted
houses, was, of course, very natural in the dark ages before the
restoration of the Stuarts, and the founding of the Royal Society.
Common-sense, and 'drolling Sadduceeism,' came to their own, in
England, with the king, with Charles II. After May 29, 1660,
Webster and Wagstaffe mocked at bogles, if Glanvill and More took
them seriously.

Before the Restoration it was distinctly dangerous to laugh at
witchcraft, ghosts and hauntings. But the laughers came in with the
merry monarch, and less by argument than by ridicule, by inveighing
against the horror, too, of the hideous witch prosecutions, the
laughers gradually brought hauntings and apparitions into contempt.
Few educated people dared to admit that their philosophy might not
be wholly exhaustive. Even ladies sneered at Dr. Johnson because
he, having no dread of common-sense before his eyes, was inclined to
hold that there might be some element of truth in a world-old and
world-wide belief; and the romantic Anna Seward told, without
accepting it, Scott's tale of 'The Tapestried chamber'. That a
hundred years after the highday and triumph of common-sense, people
of education should be found gravely investigating all that common-
sense had exploded, is a comfortable thought to the believer in
Progress. The world does not stand still.

A hundred years after the blue stockings looked on Johnson as the
last survivor, the last of the Mohicans of superstition, the
Psychical Society can collect some 400 cases of haunted houses in
England.

Ten years ago, in 1884, the society sifted out nineteen stories as
in 'the first class,' and based on good first-hand evidence. Their
analysis of the reports led them to think that there is a certain
genuine _type_ of story, and, that when a tale 'differs widely from
the type, it proves to be incorrect, or unattainable from an
authentic source'. This is very much the conclusion to which the
writer is brought by historical examination of stories about
hauntings. With exceptions, to be indicated, these tales all
approx