and thought it a good opportunity
of carrying out a suggestion which had been made to me of examining
objects in the crystal with a magnifying-glass. The glass revealed to me
that my old gentleman was writing in Greek, though the lines faded away
as I looked, all but the characters he had last traced, the Latin
numerals LXX. Then it flashed into my mind that he was one of the Jewish
Elders at work on the Septuagint, and that this date, 277 B.C., would
serve equally well for Ptolemy Philadelphus. It may be worth while to
add, though the fact was not in my conscious memory at the moment, that
I had once learnt a chronology on a mnemonic system which substituted
letters for figures, and the _memoria technica_ for this date was, "Now
Jewish Elders indite a Greek copy."'

One may, perhaps, find a simple and easy explanation of Miss Goodrich's
mirror-reading, in a theory of unconscious cerebration. The crystal
simply assisted her memory, and recalled incidents and scenes, just as
a chance odour, a bar of music, a word, a look, a name, will often do
for most of us. Clearly there is nothing necessarily either magic or
spiritualistic in this particular example of the magic mirror.

There are, however, some other experiments recorded which seem to be
only explainable on a theory of telepathy; but Mr. Max Dessoir,
commenting on the evidence of Miss Goodrich in an American Review,
attributes the whole phenomena merely to 'revived memory.'

This is all very well as to past events, but what shall we say to a case
such as the following, among Miss Goodrich's experiments?

'In January last I saw in the crystal the figure of a man crouching at a
small window, and looking into the room from the outside. I could not
see his features, which appeared to be muffled, but the crystal was
particularly dark that evening, and the picture being an unpleasant one,
I did not persevere. I concluded the vision to be a result of a
discussion in my presence of the many stories of burglary with which the
newspapers had lately abounded, and reflected with a passing
satisfaction that the only windows in the house divided into four panes,
as were those of the crystal picture, were in the front attic, and
almost inaccessible. Three days later a fire broke out in that very
room, which had to be entered from outside through the window, the face
of the fireman being covered with a wet cloth as a protection from the
smoke, which rendered access through the do