Mr. Yeats recently instructed the readers of this magazine in magic and spells, of which he is a master. My humbler purpose is to show the inquiring student how he may (perhaps) make experiments for himself in what was once thought a branch of magic, but is now an outlying province of experimental psychology. These are long words, but the experiments are as easy and simple as brushing one's hair before a glass. History and romance, ancient and modern, are full of anecdotes and legends of ‘magic mirrors,’ magic crystals, ‘show stones,’ like those of Dr. Dee, in Queen Elizabeth's time, and so forth. Conspirators have, in various ages, been accused of trying to discern, say, the period of the King's life, by looking into ‘magic mirrors.’ The early Church denounced specularii, people who peeped into these forbidden glasses with the purpose of ‘spotting’ winners in the chariot races. The Earl of Surrey, the poet, was shown his distant Geraldine in a mirror: ‘My Aunt Margaret's Mirror,’ by Sir Walter Scott, narrates a similar tradition in the Rosebery family. The ink-gazing of the modern Egyptians puzzled Lane, keenly interested Scott, and was laughed at by Kinglake in ‘Eothen.’ The experiments of the Regent d'Orleans are recorded by Saint Simon, and those of Cagliostro by Carlyle. There is, in short, a chain of examples, from the Greece of the fourth century B.C., to the cases observed by Dr. Mayo and Dr. Gregory, in the middle of the nineteenth century, and to those which Mrs. de Morgan wished to explain by ‘spiritualism.’

In spite of all these examples, I, for one, had always regarded crystal gazing and the use of ‘magic mirrors’ as purely superstitious or poetical fancies. I did not believe that any sane and truthful person could see more, say in a glass ball, than the fancy pictures we construct in the fire or the clouds, or from the stains of a damp wall. There would be reflections in the glass, which anybody, even I, could fancifully construe into, let us say, landscapes of rivers, hills, and sheets of water. In this practical, sane, and scientific mood, forswearing all examination of the subject, I remained, till I read Miss Goodrich Freer's article (signed ‘X.’), on crystal gazing.