shot through the air as if he had been fired from a gun." Peter had a
new form of epilepsy--the rising, not the falling, sickness. Joseph
Copertino, again, floated about to such good effect, that in 1650 Prince
John of Brunswick foreswore the Protestant faith. The logical process
which converted this prince is not a very obvious one.

Why do we quote all these old monkish and neoplatonic legends? For some
the evidence is obviously nil; to other anecdotes many witnesses bear
testimony; but then, we know that an infectious _schwarmerei_ can
persuade people that the lion now removed from Northumberland House
wagged his tail. The fact is that there is really matter for science in
all these anecdotes, and the question to be asked is this--How does it
happen that in ages and societies so distant and so various identical
stories are current? What is the pressure that makes neoplatonic gossips
of the fourth century circulate the same marvels as spiritualist gossips
of the nineteenth? How does it happen that the mediaeval saint, the
Indian medicine-man, the Siberian shaman (a suggestive term), have nearly
identical wonders attributed to them? If people wanted merely to tell "a
good square lie," as the American slang has it, invention does not seem
to have such pitifully narrow boundaries. It appears to follow that
there are contagious nervous illusions, about which science has not said
the last word. We believe that the life of children, with its innocent
mixture of dreams and waking, facts and fancies, could supply odd
parallels to the stories we have been treated to. And as we are on the
subject, we should like, as the late President Lincoln said, to tell a
little story. It occurred to a learned divine to meet a pupil, who ought
by rights to have been in the University of Oxford, walking in Regent
Street. The youth glided past like a ghost, and was lost in the crowd;
next day his puzzled preceptor received a note, dated on the previous day
from Oxford, telling how the pupil had met the teacher by the Isis, and