the world, knowledge must come to an end, and investigation be circumscribed indeed. Surely, all that is required to render any class of facts interesting is, that they should be new, yet not out of analogy with nature; and those we have been considering come under both these conditions. Even though they should stand alone as a class, yet, having been shown to be uncontradicted by nature's general tendencies, they should be admitted to examination. Yet here again, though demanding but justice, we are baulked. We entreat the adversaries of mesmerism to come and witness our facts. They come not; or, if hey come, scarcely deign to look at the most important and interesting phenomena; or again try experiments, not with a rigour, but with an unfairness unknown in other inquiries, expecting the sensitive being we exhibit to them to act as so much brute matter, and to be in the right when their sensibility is exhausted.

"But," piteously exclaim the systematic men, "if mesmerism be true, then all we have hitherto learned is false." By no means. But even were this so, surely it is better to get into the right path late than never. It is better also gracefully to yield than to be held up as a spectacle of vanquished yet impertinent obstinacy. And light And light-resistless light is pouring in on every side to illustrate nature, and to display mesmerism in the first rank of acknowledged truths.

It requires but little sagacity to perceive that they who now place mesmerism in the category of impossi

bilities will shortly be in the situation so well described in the following lines :

"So fares the system-building sage,
Who, plodding on from youth to age,
Has proved all other reasoners fools,
And bound all nature by his rules;
So fares he in that dreadful hour,
When injured Truth exerts her power
Some new phenomenon to raise,
Which, bursting on his frighted gaze,
From its proud summit to the ground,
Proves the whole edifice unsound."

* Beattie.

SECT. IV.

ON THE MEDIUM OF MESMERIC SENSATION.

HAVING shown, from the real nature of the changes in man's personal frame which precede sensation, that an inner sensibility, coincident with an inaction in external organs of sense, is but accordant with the principles of true physiology, I now purpose briefly to consider the pre-requisites of sensation, which are external to ourselves; the media namely, which place us in communication with foreign and distant objects; and I trust here also to demonstrate that mesmerism, instead of violating laws, does in fact bring us to grounds and principles.

Should the problem be given us to solve of conveying to a being, limited in perception and place, knowledge from a distance-how should we accomplish the desired end?

By contact, certainly, and motion.

We will imagine a person, deaf and dumb, placed at a distance from us, with his back towards us. He has been taught to distinguish, like the pupils in the Abbé Picard's institution at Paris, words written on the back. We are too far off to write these with the finger-we take a stick and write; and the person,

though distant from us, understands what we mean as well as if our thoughts were actually present to himself. Here a certain motion and configuration convey from our own mind intelligence of what is there existing to the mind of another, through the intervention of a moving medium.

So God's intention is manifestly to convey to us certain ideas from his own mind, through intermediary types or shadows; and all knowledge is God's writing on the soul by means of certain touches from afar, prolonged even unto us by communicating media. Should this view of the subject be refused, and should we be required, with cold philosophy, to limit ourselves to material objects, and to their effects upon our physical frame, it will still be perfectly evident, that particles of matter cannot act upon other particles without some means of communication.

When then we are made aware of the existence of distant bodies, it is plain that these are brought into contact with our nervous system, either by a prolongation and extension of the atoms which compose them, or by an impulse continuously carried on from themselves to us by the successive agitation of the particles of some intervening substance. The latter, in cases where the object with which we communicate is extremely remote, appears to be the most rational supposition, and with this modern science is perfectly in accord, no longer considering even light itself as a corporeal emanation from the sun, but as a

vibratory impulse communicated from the self luminous solar body to an ethereal medium, and thence again to our optic nerves.

By analogical appearances and reasoning, it seems also to be decided, that "heat, like light and sound, consists in the undulations of an elastic medium;" and it may perhaps, in process of time, still further be proved that odour is not a material emanation, but a mere action of matter communicated to our perception by the nerves. This at least would account for the now incomprehensible fact, that a grain of musk will diffuse its odour for years without any perceptible diminution of its weight.

In the admirable language of Mrs. Somerville, "The human frame may therefore be regarded as an elastic system, the different parts of which are capable of receiving the tremors of elastic media, and of vibrating in unison with any number of superposed undulations, all of which have their perfect and independent effect."

This view of the nature of our sensations cannot but greatly simplify our notions concerning them, and it is astonishing how much is effected towards the comprehension of a subject, when we put out of the way all its less important elements. The astronomer, finding it impossible to determine the motion of each heavenly body when disturbed by all the rest, takes a simpler problem, and calculates the mutual relations of three bodies only; yet thence he learns to judge of the whole celestial system. In