These are unanswerable observations, and it is only the antiquarian who can venture, in his humble way, to reply to them.  His answer has a certain force ad hominem, that is, as addressed to anthropologists.  They, too, have but recently been admitted within the scientific fold; time was when their facts were regarded as mere travellers’ tales.  Mr. Max Muller is now, perhaps, almost alone in his very low estimate of anthropological evidence, and, possibly, even that sturdy champion is beginning to yield ground.  Defending the validity of the testimony on which anthropologists reason about the evolution of religion, custom, manners, mythology, law, Mr. Tylor writes:—­

’It is a matter worthy of consideration that the accounts of similar phenomena of culture, recurring in different parts of the world, actually supply incidental proof of their own authenticity. . . .  The test of recurrence comes in. . . .  The possibility of intentional or unintentional mystification is often barred by such a state of things as that a similar statement is made in two remote lands by two witnesses, of whom A lived a century before B, and B appears never to have heard of A.’

If for ‘similar phenomena of culture’ here, we substitute ’similar abnormal phenomena’ (such as clairvoyance, wraiths, unexplained disturbances), Mr. Tylor’s argument in favour of his evidence for institutions applies equally well to our evidence for mysterious ‘facts’.  ‘How distant are the countries,’ he goes on, ’how wide apart are the dates, how different the creeds and characters in the catalogue of the facts of civilisation, needs no further showing’—­ to the student of Mr. Tylor’s erudite footnotes.  In place of ’facts of civilisation’ read ‘psychical phenomena,’ and Mr. Tylor’s argument applies to the evidence for these rejected and scouted beliefs.

The countries from which ‘ghosts’ and ‘wraiths’ and ‘clairvoyance’ are reported are ‘distant’; the dates are ‘wide apart’; the ’creeds and characters of the observers’ ’are ‘different’; yet the evidence is as uniform, and as recurrent, as it is in the case of institutions, manners, customs.  Indeed the evidence for the rejected and abnormal phenomena is even more ‘recurrent’ than the evidence for customs and institutions.  Polyandry, totemism, human sacrifice, the taboo, are only reported as existing in remote and semi-civilised countries.  Clairvoyance, wraiths, ghosts, mysterious disturbances and movements of objects are reported as existing, not only in distant ages, but today; not only among savages or barbarians, but in London, Paris, Milan.  No ages can be more wide apart, few countries much more distant, than ancient Egypt and modern England:  no characters look more different than that of an old scribe under Pharaoh, and that of a distinguished soldier under Queen Victoria.  Yet the scribe of Khemi and General Campbell suffer from the same inexplicable annoyance, attribute it to the same very abnormal agency, and attempt (not unsuccessfully) to communicate with that agency, in precisely the same way.