indeed to say, but it seems to be the fact that similar traditions and alleged phenomena occur in every corner of the globe. The Domovois of the Russians, for instance, who sweep the house and clean the hearth when everybody is asleep, are identical with the Pixies of Devonshire and with numberless other useful, although crotchety, creatures of darkness in countries that seem to have had no possible communication with one another.
The world-wide conviction that our sphere is peopled by creatures of enchantment, beings of supernatural powers and unnatural qualities, has caused many persons of otherwise reasonable habit of mind to argue that these must in some form exist. There is an irrepressible tendency in mankind to believe that where there is smoke there must be fire, and that so much cannot be said without some basis of truth. For example, Kirk, who remains valuable to us not merely as a repository of important legends, but as a man who, in the credulous seventeenth century, was trying to be an honest seeker after truth—Kirk says: “How much is written of Pigmies, Fairies, Nymphs, Syrens, Apparitions, which, tho’ not the tenth part true, yet could not spring out of nothing!” Such solemn, pious men as Richard Baxter, as Samuel Johnson, and as John Wesley have been firmly convinced that though much may be false, yet something must be true in the wonderful tales which are so constantly repeated on lines so consistent in themselves.
The answer that science has to give to this seems to be that there is no limit to the degree in which the mind of honest people is worked upon by illusion. In days when the observation of nature was primitive, people saw, rapidly and timorously, phenomena to which they gave a false interpretation. Perhaps it has not been considered how effective near sight, in an age when that condition was not merely not remedied but not even diagnosed, must have been in the creation of ghosts and other apparitions. But
