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 on inquiry had heard he was in London.  Here is a case of levitation—­of double levitation, and we leave it to be explained by the followers of Abaris and of Mr. Home.

A CHINAMAN’S MARRIAGE.

The Court of Assizes at Paris has lately been occupied with the case of a Chinese gentleman, whose personal charms and literary powers make him worthy to be the compatriot of Ah-Sin, that astute Celestial.  Tin-tun-ling is the name—­we wish we could say, with Thackeray’s F. B., “the highly respectable name”—­of the Chinese who has just been acquitted on a charge of bigamy.  In China, it is said that the more distinguished a man is the shorter is his title, and the name of a very victorious general is a mere click or gasp.  On this principle, the trisyllabic Tin-tun-ling must have been without much honour in his own country.  In Paris, however, he has learned Parisian aplomb, and when confronted with his judges and his accusers, his air, we learn, “was very calm.”  “His smile it was pensive and bland,” like the Heathen Chinee’s, and his calm confidence was justified by events.  It remains to tell the short, though not very simple, tale of Tin-tun-ling.  Mr. Ling was born in 1831, in the province of Chan-li.