the individual is weak. In all ages this has been in action, east, west, north, and south. Divination has been by any acknowledged mode of procedure-air, fire, water, earth; flight of birds, entrails of animals, by staff, by the sediment in cups, by the flight of arrows, or by lot. Thus the King of Babylon stood at the parting of the way (cross roads) to divine by mixing arrows marked, and as he drew them out read the decision; or, casting them up in the air, and divining by their fall. Joseph, in Egypt, used a divining cup to ascertain the future. King Grimschid, the Solomon of Persia, and Alexander the Great, used divining cups; by which means they were informed how to act, and were also informed as to supernatural matters. Pliny speaks of divination with water and basins. The manner of divining with the cup was little plates of gold, or silver, or some precious stones, with certain characters upon them, were thrown into it; and after certain invocations, the demon answered, sometimes by sounds, sometimes he traced the images of the persons on whose account he was interrogated—sometimes a ring was fastened to a piece of thread, and held suspended over the cup, when the ring, by its different movements, showed the several things which were enquired after. We need not travel further into the past, as the principle is developed, and the mode of action. As the great used such modes for obtaining knowledge, it cannot be wondered at that the commonality adopted similar methods for extracting knowledge, and that it has continued down through time till this hour. Ask servant girls, or young ladies, and nine out of ten can tell you more than their fathers know, of the various modes and results of divination. One curious mode was told me the other day by a lady who used to practise it when a school-girl. If she wished to know anything, she cut up a few words into separate letters, put them into a bag, and suspended them under her bed all night; next morning, she opened the bag, and by a sudden movement of the hand, scattered a portion of the letters on the floor; the letters so scattered made words, which were sufficient to inform her what to do that she always followed the advice so given, and success was the result. It is plain that Divination, under these phases, requires little or no mediumship; that the results must arise from spirits, genii, demons, or angels, controlling the animate or inanimate elements, be they birds, sediments in cups, or any other description of matter. Yea, the very clouds are asserted to have been moulded so as to depict embattled hosts, warring the one against the other; and also descending to the humble task of giving landscapes to the painter or medium, instructed to stand at a particular place and time, and watch the effects produced in the clouds, which scenes were afterwards transferred to canvass, and called "Divine;" whilst others, in like manner, have been instructed as to the future, whether personal, relative, or national. The Egyptian method of ink spots in the palms of the hand, as detailed in the section on Magic, is another illustration of one of the methods pursued for obtaining information as to the past; and the accumulation of evidences leads to the irresistible conviction, that there are intelligent influences at work to produce the results. The evidences of unseen intelligent power acting upon man, will now begin to pour in upon the reader; and in producing those evidences, the moral and intellectual qualities of those unseen beings, is, at the present state of the enquiry, of secondary importance. The primary question is-Are there any unseen beings in existence, and are they near us, watching us, and acting on us physically and mentally? If proved in the affirmative, it destroys the practical belief of threefourths of the population of Europe; and its confirmation is worth the study, energy, and power, of the brightest intellect whose forehead ever faced the sun. This question will be taken up in Section XIV., so as to place the good and the bad in the scales of wisdom. Weigh fairly, and give judgment honestly. SECTION XII. SECOND SIGHT. SECOND SIGHT is the faculty of seeing persons and things not visible to the sight of other persons in the same room. All persons, possessed of common sense, are possessed of normal second sight. Let the reader look back into his past history, and while his eyes are resting on this book, with its reading, or upon any article of furniture in the room, his mind or spirit calls up in tableaux, more or less vivid, scenes of home, of lost ones, of friends; they are perceived, or daguerotyped on the camera of the eye, or in the brain, like a panorama, or like dissolving views, while you are thought by observers to be looking on the book, or in a "fit of abstraction." These scenes are produced by a law, a natural law, we do not fully understand. That there is such a law, is evident from its universality; the mind, or spirit, puts that law in action. intuitively, as it does the limbs of the body. The mechanism of the eye appears to me to be of a twofold character, visual and perceptive; thus, we do not see the actual trees and fields, but the reflection of them in the inner part of the eye, as with a camera obscura. The image so produced being seen by us through the telescope or tube running from the middle of the head to the camera; so, in like manner, it appears to me, the mechanism of the eye is used by us to perceive, and give form to principles or ideas. Watching the countenance of a man while intensely thinking, we see that he contracts his eyebrows and all the surroundings of his eyes; he appears to look intently towards, but evidently not at, the objects before him. If we try the effect upon ourselves, we find the nerves of the eye stiffen, as when viewing material substances. The camera, therefore, is for producing the scenery of thought, conveyed there through the phrenological lens or organs of the brain. I am at present suffering from inflammation in the interior of the right eye; the outer or crystalized surface is free from any inflammatory action, but the sight is almost gone. When I open the eye pain is produced; when I close it, I see the end of the telescope tube nearest the eye, flickering with light like an argand gas burner; the coruscations of light reminding me of the electrical sparks issuing from a galvanic battery. After resting, the irritation and light-producing phenomena subside, all return to their normal state. If I throw my mind on any subject, and think intently, with my eyes closed, I perceive the reproduction of the quivering light or flashes round the edge of the tube or telescope before referred to. This principle in human vision, materially assists us in understanding the phenomena of second sight, namely, the power some men have of perceiving the images of incidents, past, present, and future, cameried in the eye as if a reality, while the crystalline of the eye appears only absorbing the image of the solid substances in front of it; the actual solid scene is there, but there overlays it as if on a coat of varnish, the created scenes we have referred to. The normal power of man is limited; he can think of China, of Australia; he can create imaginary people, dresses, and scenery; he can create images of possible future events, but all those scenes have no truth in them. He did not see China and its people, neither has he pictured future events; but if through Biology another man's remembrance of what he saw in Australia can be pictured in the eye by the force of the operator's will and perceptive energy, the person really sees the truth, or, rather, an image of the truth, in the camera of the eye, and he will describe a reality, not a fiction. A few weeks ago I had a beautiful illustration of this phenomena of second sight; whether it was my normal dream faculty or not, I cannot say: one morning just before getting out of bed, whether my eyes were open or not, I cannot say; but I plainly saw the pattern of my bed-room paperhangings on the wall, and between me and it I saw apparently a biscuit porcelain statuette, about three feet high, SECTION XII. SECOND SIGHT. SECOND SIGHT is the faculty of seeing persons and things not visible to the sight of other persons in the same room. All persons, possessed of common sense, are possessed of normal second sight. Let the reader look back into his past history, and while his eyes are resting on this book, with its reading, or upon any article of furniture in the room, his mind or spirit calls up in tableaux, more or less vivid, scenes of home, of lost ones, of friends; they are perceived, or daguerotyped on the camera of the eye, or in the brain, like a panorama, or like dissolving views, while you are thought by observers to be looking on the book, or in a "fit of abstraction." These scenes are produced by a law, a natural law, we do not fully understand. That there is such a law, is evident from its universality; the mind, or spirit, puts that law in action intuitively, as it does the limbs of the body. The mechanism of the eye appears to me to be of a twofold character, visual and perceptive; thus, we do not see the actual trees and fields, but the reflection of them in the inner part of the eye, as with a camera obscura. The image so produced being seen by us through the telescope or tube running from the middle of the head to the camera; so, in like manner, it appears to me, the mechanism of the eye is used by us to perceive, and give form to principles or ideas. Watching the countenance of a man while intensely thinking, we see that he contracts his eyebrows and all the surroundings of his eyes; he appears to look intently towards, but evidently not at, the objects before him. If we try the effect upon ourselves, we find the nerves of the eye stiffen, as when viewing material substances. The camera, therefore, is for producing. the scenery of thought, conveyed there through the phrenological lens or organs of the brain. I am at present suffering from inflammation in the interior of the right eye; the outer |