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Rh was appointed chancellor of the new university of Halle, but he died a few weeks afterwards, on the 18th of December.

Seckendorf’s principal works were the following:—Teutscher Fürstenstaat (1656 and 1678), a handbook of German public law; Der Christenstaat (1685), partly an apology for Christianity and partly suggestions for the reformation of the church, founded on Pascal’s Pensées and embodying the fundamental ideas of Spener; Commentarius historicus et apologeticus de Lutheranismo sive de Reformatione (3 vols., Leipzig, 1692), occasioned by the Jesuit Maimbourg’s Histoire du Luthéranisme (Paris, 1680), his most important work, and still indispensable to the historian of the Reformation as a rich storehouse of authentic materials.

See Richard Pahner, Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff und seine Gedanken über Erziehung und Unterricht (Leipzig, 1892), the best sketch of Seckendorf’s life, based upon original sources. See also Theodor Kolde, “Seckendorf,” in Herzog-Hauck’s Realencyklopädie (1906).  SECKER, THOMAS (1693-1768), archbishop of Canterbury, was born at Sibthorpe Nottinghamshire. He studied medicine in London, Paris and Leiden, receiving his M.D. degree at Leiden in 1721. Having decided to take orders he graduated, by special letters from the chancellor, at Exeter College, Oxford, and was ordained in 1722. In 1724 he became rector of Houghton-1e-Spring, Durham, resigning in 1727 on his appointment to the rectory of Ryton, Durham, and to a canonry of Durham. He became rector of St James's, Westminster, in 1733, and bishop of Bristol in 1735. About this time George II. commissioned him to arrange a reconciliation between the prince of Wales and himself, but the attempt was unsuccessful. In 1737 he was translated to Oxford, and he received the deanery of St Paul's in 1750. In 1758 he became archbishop of Canterbury. His advocacy of an American episcopate, in connexion with which he wrote the Answer to Dr Mayhew's Observations on the Charter and Conduct of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London 1764), raised considerable opposition in England and America.

His principal work was Lectures on the Catechism of the Church of England (London, 1769).  SECOND (through Fr. from Lat. secundus, following, sequi, to follow), next after the first in order, time rank &c., more particularly the ordinal number corresponding to two. It is the only French ordinal in English; the older word was “other,” Ger. ander Goth. anthar, Skt. antara. The use of the word for the sixtieth part of a minute of time and of degree is from Med. Lat. secunda, abbreviation of minuta secunda, the second small division of the hour, minuta prima or minuta being the first division. Another particular meaning is for one who supports or assists another, especially the friend at a duel, who arranges for his principal the terms of the encounter and sees that all rules of the duel are carried out. In the British army an officer is said to be “seconded” (with the accent on the second syllable) when he is employed on special service outside his regiment, his name being retained on the regimental list, but his place being filled by promotion of other officers. He may rejoin his regiment when his special employment is at an end.  SECOND SIGHT, a term denoting the opposite of its apparent significance, meaning in reality the seeing, in vision, of events beforethey occur. “Foresight” expresses the meaning of second sight, which perhaps was originally so called because normal vision was regarded as coming first, while supernormal vision is a secondary thing, confined to certain individuals.

Though we hear most of the “second sight” among the Celts of the Scottish Highlands (it is much less familiar to the Celts of Ireland), this species of involuntary prophetic vision, whether direct or symbolical, is peculiar to no people. Perhaps our earliest notice of symbolical second sight is found in the Odyssey, where Theoclymenus sees a shroud of mist about the bodies of the doomed Wooers, and drops of blood distilling from the walls of the hall of Odysseus. The Pythia at Delphi saw the blood on the walls during the Persian War; and, in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, blood and fire appear to Circe in her chamber on the night before the arrival of the fratricidal Jason and Medea. Similar examples of symbolical visions occur in the Icelandic sagas, especially in Njala, before the burning of Njal and his family. In the Highlands, and in Wales, the

chief symbols beheld are the shroud, and the corpse candle or other spectral illumination. The Rev. Dr Stewart, of Nether Lochaber, informed the present writer that one of his parishioners, a woman, called him to his door, and pointed out to him a rock by the sea, which shone in a kind of phosphorescent brilliance. The doctor attributed the phenomenon to decaying sea-weed, but the woman said, “No, a corpse will be laid there to-morrow.” This, in fact, occurred; a dead body was brought in a boat for burial, and was laid at the foot of the rock, where, as Dr Stewart found, there was no decaying vegetable matter.

Second sight flourished among the Lapps and the Red Indians, the Zulus and Maoris, to the surprise of travellers, who have recorded the puzzling facts. But in these cases the visions were usually “induced,” not “spontaneous,” and should be considered as “” (q.v.). Ranulf Higdon's Polychronicon (14th century) describes Scottish second sight, adding that strangers “setten their feet upon the feet of the men of that londe for to see such syghtes as the men of that londe doon.” This method of communicating the vision is still practised, with success, according to the late Dr Stewart. The present writer once had the opportunity to make an experiment, but to him the vision was not imparted. (For the method see Kirk's Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, 1691, 1815, 1893.) It is, by some, believed that if a person tells what he has seen before the event occurs he will lose the faculty, and recently a second-sighted man, for this reason, did not warn his brother against taking part in a regatta, though he had foreseen the accident by which his brother was drowned. Where this opinion prevails it is, of course, impossible to prove that the vision ever occurred. There are many seers, as Lord Tarbat wrote to Robert Boyle, to whom the faculty is a trouble, “and they would be rid of it at any rate, if they could.”

Perhaps the visions most frequently reported are those of funerals, which later occur in accordance with “the sight,” of corpses, and of “arrivals” of persons, remote at the moment, who later do arrive, with some distinctive mark of dress or equipment which the seer could not normally expect, but observed in the vision. Good examples in their own experience have been given to the present writer by well-educated persons. Some of the anecdotes are too surprising to be published without the names of the seers. A fair example of second sight is the following from Balachulish. An aged man of the last generation was troubled by visions of armed men in uniform, drilling in a particular field near the sea. The uniform was not “England's cruel red,” and he foresaw an invasion. “It must be of Americans,” he decided, “for the soldiers do not look like foreigners.” The Volunteer movement later came into being, and the men drilled on the ground where the seer had seen them. Another case was that of a man who happened to be sitting with a boy on the edge of a path in the quarry. Suddenly he caught the boy and leaped aside with him. He had seen a runaway trolly, with men in it, dash down the path; but there were no traces of them below. “The spirits of the living are powerful to-day,” said the percipient in Gaelic, and next day the fatal accident occurred at the spot. These are examples of what is, at present, alleged in the matter of second sight.

“The sight” may, or may not, be preceded or accompanied by epileptic symptoms, but this appears now to be unusual. A learned minister lately made a few inquiries on this point in his parish, at the request of the present writer. His beadle had “the sight” in rich measure: “it was always preceded by a sense of discomfort and anxiety,” but was not attended by convulsions. Out of seven or eight seers in the parish, only one was not perfectly healthy and temperate. A well-known seer, now dead, whom the writer consulted, was weak of body, the result of an accident, but seemed candid, and ready to confess that his visions were occasionally failures. He said that “the sight” first came on him in the village street when he was a boy. He saw a dead woman walk down the street and enter the house that had been hers. He gave a few examples of his foresight of events, and one of his failure to discover the corpse of a man drowned in the loch. 