truth, boldly disclaims for his countrymen the notion of demoniac influence, referring it to physical impression, somewhat resembling the fascination of the eye of the rattlesnake, that drops, as we are told, the bird from the branch into its mouth. In that exquisite sympathy between mind and body (the sequence of an influence on sensibility, or on the senses) consists the secret of all this.

You remember the effects of intense impression on the mind in the excitement of catalepsy, and, indeed, in causing instantaneous death: this is intense influence on the sensibility. The effects of deep impression on the sight or touch, by the passes of magnetism, are magnetic ecstasies: this is intense influence on the senses. So that all your

mysteries are the result of this influence passing through the brain to the body; and the vaunted miracles of Mesmer, and Bertrand, and Dupotet are, as I have said, impositions, chiefly as regards the nature of their influence; and, like these, the doctrines of Fludd the Seeker, of the Abbé Nollet, of Lavater, of Nicetas the Jesuit, and the quaint ideas of many other visionaries, which you may read in their writings, are really explicable by the laws of physiology.

When the magnetizer asserts that a patient should possess a disposition to be acted on, he unwarily divulges his own secret; for this is nothing more than blind faith in a promise. And this credulity is most characteristic of that disordered condition of a nerve, acute sensibility, in which the slightest causes may effect a seeming wonder. Nay, even disease and death were so induced during the manipulations of Hensler and Emmelin.

This also is the secret of that influence imparted by the touch of a seventh son; or of the hand of a criminal hanging on the gallows; or the revolting P

precept of Pliny, that an epileptic should drink the blood of a dying gladiator as it gushes from his wound; or the stroking of Valentine Greatrex; the sympathetic powder of Sir Kenelm Digby; the tractors of Perkins; of chiromancy, rhabdomancy, and of other curiosities recorded in tracts and journals. In my professional life I have seen the same influence, though infinitely less in degree, imparted by an implicit confidence in the blessings of our science. Even Bertrand honestly confesses its

power.

A lady was thrown into deep sleep by the touch of a magnet, sent by him in a handkerchief from the distance of three hundred miles. But the same effect was produced by the contact of unmagnetized cambric; and Bertrand allows that where an ignorance of his intention existed, even the magnetized talisman was powerless over his patient.

I could tell you tales of bits of wood effecting all the wonders of the metallic tractors of Perkins; and cubes of lead, and those of nickel, fraught, as a learned doctor had declared, with magnetic virtues; but I spare you.

From this superstitious faith spring also the miracles of that pious saint, who had assumed the staff of Saint Francis Xavier, the Prince Hohenloe. One of these was the cure of Miss O'Connor, attested by Dr. Baddeley, of Chelmsford, who had tried in vain to relieve the lady of acute neuralgia. She was directed to prostrate herself at the altar in Chelmsford at the moment when the sainted prince would kneel at his shrine in the Cathedral of Bamberg. At the appointed time, during the solemn celebration of high mass, as she exclaimed, Thy will be done, O Lord," the agonizing limb was painless.

I do not doubt the possibility of such an incident.

And here is the unfolding of another secret of these German magnetizers, who were believed to shoot at their patients with the unerring aim of a rifle, even though many miles might intervene. Nadler, as we are told in the "Asclepeion," was so good a shot, that he brought a woman to the ground at the moment he fired his magnetic aura at her, aiming between the eyes and the bosom, even at the distance of eighteen miles.

I am aware that this, my philosophy, would not pass current at the Vatican; for "the congregation of the holy office, having once applied to the pope to know if animal magnetism were lawful, and if penitents might be permitted to be operated on, his holiness replied that the application of principles and means purely physical to things and ef fects which are supernatural, for the purpose of explaining them physically, is nothing but an unlawful and heretical deception."

But I may tell you that his holiness himself was once a great monopolist of saints' cures, if we may believe a book, printed by Roberts, in London, in 1605, entitled, "A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, to withdraw the hearts of religious men, under pretence of casting out devils; practised by Father Edmunds, alias Weston, a Jesuite, and divers Romish priests, his wicked associates."

And, moreover, the interference of priests has often led to the interdiction of Protestants, in their scientific ministering to disease the most severe, as typhus fever, or surgical operations, because they were heretics; while the profane Paracelsus says, "It matters not, by God or devil, so he be cured;" even without an indulgence, I presume, from Della Ganga, or the leave of the sacred college.

Believe me, the influence of faith will illustrate all this mystery, and reduce even these impostures

to a simple truth. Without it, only the grossest superstition would believe that sympathy would thus "take the wings of the morning," and impart to a mind that was thinking at our antipodes a consciousness of our own sentiments; for this would be a revival of that blind credulity which, in the darker ages, was reposed in the superhuman agency of magic and of witchcraft.

SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE.

"She was a charmer, and could almost read
The thoughts of people."-Othello.

IDA. As you unfold the wonders of the mind, Evelyn, the secrets of many splendid mysteries shine forth in the light of your truth; and the wisdom of "charmed rings,' ," "blessed brambles," and amulets and talismans, fades before the precepts of a purer faith. Yet is there no witchcraft in your philosophy? You have, methinks, absolved Astrophel from spells and dark hours, for, in the softened lustre of his eye, I see a light more holy than its wonted flash of divination.

CAST. You have more faith in his conversion than I have, Ida; for, lo ye now! on a mossy stone in Tintern lay this sable velvet pouch, which, from its mystic 'broidery, might be the lost treasure of a Rosicrucian cabalist.

"There's magic in the web of it;
A sibyl that had number'd in the world
The sun to make two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew'd the work."

And here is a scroll of vellum folded within it.
Listen, and you shall hear the pencillings of some
unhappy student, benighted in the mazes of the
Cabala.

"The eye of modern philosophy may wink at

the wisdom of occult sciences, and sorcerers and magicians, necromancers and Rosicrucians, cabalists and conjurers, astrologers and soothsayers, Philomaths, Drows, and Oreades, wizards and witches, and warlocks, and sibyls and gipsies, may be, in its estimation, a mere legion of ciphers. Yet faith hath been long and firmly lavished on the art of divination by the learned and mighty men in all ages. The Chaldean, who read the stars, was the coryphæus and the type of superhuman knowledge; the magi of Persia and Egypt, and other Orient lands, followed in his wake. The venerable Hermes Trismegistus was surrounded by his proselytes in the year of the world 2076; and Apollonius, and Zoroaster, and Pythagoras, and, in later ages, John of Leyden, Roger Bacon, and other learned mystagogues, have imbibed a more than mortal wisdom from the aspect of those starry lights which gem the vaulted firmament, while the luminous schools of Padua, and Seville, and Salamanca were rich in the records of occult and mystic learning. Emperors, and kings, and ministers, who ruled the destiny of mighty nations, have believed. Wallenstein was all confiding; Richelieu and Mazarin (as Morin writes) retained soothsayers as a part of their household; Napoleon studied with implicit faith his book of fate; and Canute, obedient to his confidence in the virtue of relics, directed his Roman agent to buy St. Augustine's arms for one hundred silver talents and one of gold.

6

"Nay, what saith divinity itself? Glanville, the chaplain of King Charles II., affirms, in his 'Saducismus Triumphatus,' that the disbeliever in a witch must believe the devil gratis;' and Wesley said that giving up witchcraft was, in fact, giving up the Bible.' Now, as the Chaldean sophs were divided into three classes-1. The 'Ascaphim,' or