608 NEW BOOKS. it is not easy to see how they could have been more carefully investigated than by Mr. Guthrie, or afterwards more rigidly tested than by the prac- tised experimental skill of Dr. Lodge. The other most notable piece among the varied contents of these Parts is the " Theory of Apparitions " set out at length (nearly 60 pp.) in vi. by Messrs. E. Guruey and F. W. H. Myers. Here the authors, deferring the case of apparitions of the dead, seek to connect certain representative cases of " phantasms of the living," through a graduated series of other related experiences as mean terms, with the simple experimental facts of " thought-transference," under one general conception of " Telepathy ". The mediation of the extremes is worked out with no little skill, and that the object is pursued with a strictly scientific intention may be credited by readers of this Journal who are familiar with the work of one of the writers. It is not possible, how- ever, to regard the " physical theory " here set up to account for the facts as very satisfactory. Not to dwell upon the looseness of the conception of " Telepathy " which does not seem very well calculated to cover affections where distance of the supposed agent, beyond the recognised range of any of the senses, is the salient fact, with others, as in experimental " thought- transference," where, be the ordinary senses involved or not, distance is not a consideration we are asked to suppose that one man may have (subjective) experience of a phantasm on occasion of what is being consciously or unconsciously) experienced by another, through " telepathic impulse " received from the active brain of this other by the higher centres of the brain of the first, whence it works down to the lower sense-centres implicated in the experience of the particular kind of phantasm. Before such a supposition can be dignified with the name of a " physical theory," some conceivable means of transference should be suggested, but even more necessary does it seem that some definite relationship of similarity should be made out between the mental experiences in agent and patient with which their brain-states correspond. Now very rarely, in the cases cited, is there any such relationship, nor is the real difficulty to any extent removed by all the clever piecing of evidence and sometimes subtle psycho- logical suggestion to be met with in this Report. The time to judge of the authors' whole case, and especially of the weight of the communicated testimony, will be when both are published at length in the book they promise on " Phantasms of the Living ". Meanwhile one is disposed to suggest that more valuable than any farther cumulation of such narratives as are here given, on not a few of which there might be a good deal to remark, would be some very rigid experimentation with that remarkable person who can produce at will the effects upon other minds mentioned in passing at pp. 166, 171. He seems to be exactly the subject upon whom scientific determination of the facts of " telepathic impulse " could be made, or at least begun. On the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by tlue Native Religions of Mexico and Peru. " Hibbert Lectures " delivered at Oxford and London, in April and May, 1884. By ALBERT REVILLE, D.D., Pro- fessor of the Science of Religions at the College de France. Trans- lated by PHILIP H. WICKSTEED, M.A. London : Williams & Norgate, 1884. Pp. 256. Three of these interesting (and very well translated) Lectures are occu- pied with the Mexican, and three with, the Peruvian, religion ; the last of the six including also, from p. 240 to p. 256, a statement of general con- clusions drawn from the study of the two systems. The author, regarding both religions as purely autochthonous and uninfluenced from without,
