Andrew Lang - The Book of Dreams and Ghosts

Perhaps among such papers as the Casket Letters , exhibited to the Commission at Westminster, and “tabled” before the Scotch Privy Council.

To Joseph himself she bequeathed the ruby tortoise given to her by his brother. Probably the diamonds were not Rizzio’s gift.

Boismont was a distinguished physician and “Mad Doctor,” or “Alienist”. He was also a Christian, and opposed a tendency, not uncommon in his time, as in ours, to regard all “hallucinations” as a proof of mental disease in the “hallucinated”.

S.P.R ., v., 324.

Ibid ., 324.

Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research , vol. v., pp. 324, 325.

Proceedings , S.P.R ., vol. xi., p. 495.

Signed by Mr. Cooper and the Duchess of Hamilton.

See Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty , p. 91.

Proceedings , S.P.R ., vol. xi., p. 522.

The case was reported in the Herald (Dubuque) for 12th February, 1891. It was confirmed by Mr. Hoffman, by Mr. George Brown and by Miss Conley, examined by the Rev. Mr. Crum, of Dubuque. — Proceedings , S.P.R ., viii., 200-205. Pat Conley, too, corroborated, and had no theory of explanation. That the girl knew beforehand of the dollars is conceivable, but she did not know of the change of clothes.

Told by the nobleman in question to the author.

The author knows some eight cases among his friends of a solitary meaningless hallucination like this.

As to the fact of such visions, I have so often seen crystal gazing, and heard the pictures described by persons whose word I could not doubt, men and women of unblemished character, free from superstition, that I am obliged to believe in the fact as a real though hallucinatory experience. Mr. Clodd attributes it to disorder of the liver. If no more were needed I could “scry” famously!

Facts attested and signed by Mr. Baillie and Miss Preston.

Story told to me by both my friends and the secretary.

Mémoires , v., 120. Paris, 1829.

Readers curious in crystal-gazing will find an interesting sketch of the history of the practice, with many modern instances, in Proceedings , S.P.R ., vol. v., p. 486, by “Miss X.”. There are also experiments by Lord Stanhope and Dr. Gregory in Gregory’s Letters on Animal Magnetism , p. 370 (1851). It is said that, as sights may be seen in a glass ball, so articulate voices, by a similar illusion, can be heard in a sea shell, when

“It remembers its august abodes,

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there”.

A set of scientific men, as Lélut and Lombroso, seem to think that a hallucination stamps a man as mad . Napoleon, Socrates, Pascal, Jeanne d’Arc, Luther were all lunatics. They had lucid intervals of considerable duration, and the belief in their lunacy is peculiar to a small school of writers.

A crowd of phantom coaches will be found in Messrs. Myers and Gurney’s Phantasms of the Living.

See The Slaying of Sergeant Davies of Guise’s.

Principles of Psychology , by Prof. James of Harvard, vol. ii., p. 612. Charcot is one of sixteen witnesses cited for the fact.