America. We do not yet even keep any ghostly zoological garden in
which the bogies of Japanese, Australians, Red Indians, and other
distant peoples may be accommodated. Such an establishment is
perhaps to be desired in the interests of psychical research, but
that form of research has not yet been endowed by a cultivated and
progressive government.

The first to attract our attention represents, as I understand, the
common ghost, or simulacrum vulgare of psychical science. To this
complexion must we all come, according to the best Japanese opinion.
Each of us contains within him "somewhat of a shadowy being," like
the spectre described by Dr. Johnson: something like the Egyptian
"Ka," for which the curious may consult the works of Miss Amelia B.
Edwards and other learned Orientalists. The most recent French
student of these matters, the author of 'L'Homme Posthume,' is of
opinion that we do not all possess this double, with its power of
surviving our bodily death. He thinks, too, that our ghost, when it
does survive, has but rarely the energy and enterprise to make
itself visible to or audible by "shadow-casting men." In some
extreme cases the ghost (according to our French authority, that of
a disciple of M. Comte) feeds fearsomely on the bodies of the
living. In no event does he believe that a ghost lasts much longer
than a hundred years. After that it mizzles into spectre, and is
resolved into its elements, whatever they may be.

A somewhat similar and (to my own mind) probably sound theory of
ghosts prevails among savage tribes, and among such peoples as the
ancient Greeks, the modern Hindoos, and other ancestor worshippers.
When feeding, as they all do, or used to do, the ghosts of the
ancestral dead, they gave special attention to the claims of the