tity, say
St. Theresa, St. Francis, or St. Joseph of Cupertino. Granting the
survival of a savage exaggeration, granting the hallucinated saint,
we may, perhaps, explain the innumerable anecdotes about miraculous
levitation of which a few are repeated in our paper on 'Comparative
Psychical Research.' The witnesses in witch trials, and in
ecclesiastical inquiries, and Lord Orrery, and Mr. Greatrakes, and
the Cromwellian soldiery in Scotland, the Spanish in Peru, Cotton
Mather in New England, saw what they expected to see, what tradition
taught them to look for, in the case of a convulsionary, or a saint,
or a catechumen. The consensus in illusion was wonderful, but let
us grant, for the sake of argument, that it was possible. Let us
add another example, from Cochin China.

The witness and narrator is Delacourt, a French missionary. The
source is a letter of his of November 25, 1738, to Winslow the
anatomist, Membre de l'Academie des Sciences a Paris. It is printed
in the Institutiones Theologicae of Collet, who attests the probity
of the missionary. {324}

In May or June, 1733, Delacourt was asked to view a young native
Christian, said by his friends to be 'possessed'.

'Rather incredulous,' as he says, Delacourt went to the lad, who had
communicated, as he believed, unworthily, and was therefore a prey
to religious excitement, which, as Bishop Callaway found among his
Zulu converts, and as Wodrow attests among 'savoury Christians,'
begets precisely such hallucinations as annoyed the early hermits
like St. Anthony. Delacourt addressed the youth in Latin: he
replied, Ego nescio loqui Latine, a tag which he might easily have
picked up, let us say. Delacourt led him into church, where the
patient was violently convulsed. Delacourt then (remembering the
example set by the Bishop of Tilopolis) ordered the demon _in
Latin_, to carry the boy to the ceiling. 'His body became stiff, he
was dragged from the middle of the church to a pillar, and there,
his feet joined, his back fixed (colle) against the pillar, he was
transported in the twinkling of an eye to the ceiling, like a weight
rapidly drawn up, without any apparent action on his part. I kept
him in the air for half an hour, and then bade him drop without
hurting himself,' when he fell 'like a packet of dirty linen'.
While he was up aloft, Delacourt preached at him in Latin, and he
became, 'perhaps the best Christian in Cochin China'.

Dr. Carpenter's expl