s,' made
disturbances worthy of a spectre peculiarly able-bodied. But, not
counting the evidence of the Icelandic sagas, mediaeval literature,
like classical literature, needs to be carefully sifted before it
yields a few grains of such facts as sane and educated witnesses
even now aver to be matter of their personal experience. No doubt
the beliefs were prevalent, the Latin prayer proves that, but
examples were seldom recorded.

Thus the dark ages do _not_, as might have been expected, provide us
with most of this material. The last forty enlightened years give
us more bogles than all the ages between St. Augustine and the
Restoration. When the dark ages were over, when learning revived,
the learned turned their minds to 'Psychical Research,' and Wier,
Bodin, Le Loyer, Georgius Pictorius, Petrus Thyraeus, James VI.,
collected many instances of the phenomena still said to survive.
Then, for want of better materials, the unhappy, tortured witches
dragged into their confessions all the folklore which they knew.
Second sight, the fairy world, ghosts, 'wraiths,' 'astral bodies' of
witches whose bodies of flesh are elsewhere, volatile chairs and
tables, all were spoken of by witches under torture, and by sworn
witnesses. {31} Resisting the scepticism of the Restoration,
Glanvil, More, Boyle, and the rest, fought the Sadducee with the
usual ghost stories. Wodrow, later (1701-1731), compiled the
marvels of his Analecta. In spite of the cold common-sense of the
eighteenth century, sporadic outbreaks of rappings and feats of
impulsive pots, pans, beds and chairs insisted on making themselves
notorious. The Wesley case would never have been celebrated if the
sons of Samuel Wesley had not become prominent. John Wesley and the
Methodists revelled in such narratives, and so the catena of
testimonies was lengthened till Mesmer came, and, with Mesmer, the
hypothesis of a 'fluidic force' which in various shapes has endured,
and is not, even now, wholly extinct. Finally Modern Spiritualism
arrived, and was, for the most part, an organised and fraudulent
copy of the old popular phenomena, with a few cheap and vulgar
variations on the theme.

In the face of these facts, it does not seem easy to aver that one
kind of age, one sort of 'culture' is more favourable to the
occurrence of, or belief in, these phenomena than another.
Accidental circumstances, an increase, or a decrease of knowledge
and education, an access of religi