I have already given, in the Introduction, Ellis’s record of the Polynesian case.  A hole being dug in the door of his house, and filled with water, the priest looks for a vision of the thief who has carried off stolen goods.  The Polynesian theory is that the god carries the spirit of the thief over the water, in which it is reflected.  Lejeune’s Red Indians make their patients gaze into the water, in which they will see the pictures of the things in the way of food or medicine that will do them good.  In modern language, the instinctive knowledge existing implicitly in the patient’s subconsciousness is thus brought into the range of his ordinary consciousness.

In 1887 the late Captain J. T. Bourke, of the U.S.  Cavalry, an original and careful observer, visited the Apaches in the interests of the Ethnological Bureau.  He learned that one of the chief duties of the medicine-men was to find out the whereabouts of lost or stolen property.  Na-a-cha, one of these jossakeeds, possessed a magic quartz crystal, which he greatly valued.  Captain Bourke presented him with a still finer crystal.  ’He could not give me an explanation of its magical use, except that by looking into it he could see everything he wanted to see,’ Captain Bourke appears never to have heard of the modern experiments in crystal-gazing.  Captain Bourke also discovered that the Apaches, like the Greeks, Australians, Africans, Maoris, and many other, races, use the bull-roarer, turndun, or rhombos—­a piece of wood which, being whirled round, causes a strange windy roar—­in their mystic ceremonies.  The wide use of the rhombos was known to Captain Bourke; that of the crystal was not.

For the Iroquois, Mrs. Erminie Smith supplies information about the crystal.  ’Placed in a gourd of water, it could render visible the apparition of a person who has bewitched another.’  She gives a case in European times of a medicine-man who found the witch’s habitat, but got only an indistinct view of her face.  On a second trial he was successful.[2] One may add that treasure-seekers among the Huille-che ‘look earnestly’ for what they want to find ’into a smooth slab of black stone, which I suppose to be basalt.’[3]

The kindness of Monsieur Lefebure enables me to give another example from Madagascar.[4] Flacourt, describing the Malagasies, says that they squillent (a word not in Littre), that is, divine by crystals, which ‘fall from heaven when it thunders,’ Of course the rain reveals the crystals, as it does the flint instruments called ‘thunderbolts’ in many countries.  ’Lorsqu’ils squillent, ils ont une de ces pierres au coing de leurs tablettes, disans qu’elle a la vertu de faire faire operation a leur figure de geomance.’  Probably they used the crystals as do the Apaches.  On July 15 a Malagasy woman viewed, whether in her crystal or otherwise, two French vessels which, like the Spanish fleet, were ‘not in sight,’ also officers, and doctors, and others aboard, whom she had seen, before their return to France, in Madagascar.  The earliest of the ships did not arrive till August 11.