It will be remarked that the faculty is freakish, and does not always
respond to conscious exertion of thought in the mind of the inquirer.
Thus, in Case I. a connection of the person thought of is discerned; in
another the mind of a stranger present seems to be read. In another
case (not given here) the inquirer tried to visualise a card for a
person present to guess, while Miss Angus was asked to describe an object
which the inquirer was acquainted with, but which he banished from his
conscious thought. The double experiment was a double-barrelled success.

It seems hardly necessary to point out that chance coincidence will not
cover this set of cases, where in each 'guess' the field of conjecture
is boundless, and is not even narrowed by the crystal-gazer's knowledge
of the persons for whose diversion she makes the experiment. As
'muscle-reading' is not in question (in the one case of contact between
inquirer and crystal-gazer the results were unexpected), and as no
unconsciously made signs could convey, for example, the idea of a cavalry
soldier in uniform, or an accident on a race-course in two _tableaux_, I
do not at present see any more plausible explanation than that of thought
transference, though how that is to account for some of the cases given I
do not precisely understand.

Any one who can accept the assurance of my personal belief in the
good faith of all concerned will see how very useful this faculty of
crystal-gazing must be to the Apache or Australian medicine-man or
Polynesian priest. Freakish as the faculty is, a few real successes, well
exploited and eked out by fraud, would set up a wizard's reputation. That
a faculty of being thus affected is genuine seems proved, apart from
modern evidence, by the world-wide prevalence of crystal-gazing in the
ethnographic region. But the discovery of this prevalence had not been
made, to my knowledge, before modern instances induced me to notice the