action on thought and matter is again confidently asserted, as in those times and countries where physical science had not as yet so far succeeded in extruding these spirits and their influences from the system of nature.
Apparitions have regained the place and meaning which they held from the level of the lower races to that of mediæval Europe. The regular ghost-stories, in which spirits of the dead walk visibly and have intercourse with corporeal men, are now restored and cited with new examples as 'glimpses of the night-side of nature,' nor have these stories changed either their strength to those who are disposed to believe them, or their weakness to those who are not. As of old, men live now in habitual intercourse with the spirits of the dead. Necromancy is a religion, and the Chinese manes-worshipper may see the outer barbarians come back, after a heretical interval of a few centuries, into sympathy with his time-honoured creed. As the sorcerers of barbarous tribes lie in bodily lethargy or sleep while their souls depart on distant journeys, so it is not uncommon in modern spiritualistic narratives for persons to be in an insensible state when their apparitions visit distant places, whence they bring back information, and where they communicate with the living. The spirits of the living as well as of the dead, the souls of Strauss and Carl Vogt as well as of Augustine and Jerome, are summoned by mediums to distant spirit-circles. As Dr. Bastian remarks, if any celebrated man in Europe feels himself at some moment in a melancholy mood, he may console himself with the idea that his soul has been sent for to America, to assist at the 'rough fixings' of some backwoodsman. Fifty years ago, Dr. Macculloch, in his 'Description of the Western Islands of Scotland,' wrote thus of the famous Highland second-sight: 'In fact it has undergone the fate of witchcraft; ceasing to be believed, it has ceased to exist,' Yet a generation later he would have found it reinstated in a far larger range of society, and under far better circumstances of learning and material prosperity. Among the influences
