the best attested modern examples, experimental or spontaneous. This
raises the question of our evidence, which is all-important. We proceed to
defend it. The savage accounts are on the level of much anthropological
evidence; they may, that is, be dismissed by adversaries as 'travellers'
tales.' But the best testimony for the truth of the reports as to actual
belief in the facts is the undesigned coincidence of evidence from all
ages and quarters.[5] When the stories brought by travellers, ancient and
modern, learned and unlearned, pious or sceptical, agree in the main, we
have all the certainty that anthropology can offer. Again, when we find
practically the same strange neglected sparks, not only rumoured of
in European popular superstition, but attested in many hundreds of
depositions made at first hand by respectable modern witnesses, educated
and responsible, we cannot honestly or safely dismiss the coincidence of
report as indicating a mere 'survival' of savage superstitious belief, and
nothing more.

We can no longer do so, it is agreed, in the case of hypnotic phenomena. I
hope to make it seem possible that we should not do so in the matter of
the hallucinations provoked by gazing in a smooth deep, usually styled
'crystal-gazing.' Ethnologically, this practice is at least as old as
classical times, and is of practically world-wide distribution. I shall
prove its existence in Australia, New Zealand, North America, South
America, Asia, Africa, Polynesia, and among the Incas, not to speak of
the middle and recent European ages. The universal idea is that such
visions may be 'clairvoyant.' To take a Polynesian case, 'resembling the
Hawaiian _wai harru_.' When anyone has been robbed, the priest, after
praying, has a hole dug in the floor of the house, and filled with water.
Then he gazes into the water, 'over which the god is supposed to place the
spirit of the thief.... The image of the thief was, according to their
account, reflected in the water, and being perceived by the priest, he