a preacher of great local renown, had just written an article for the Witness newspaper, depreciatory of the whole subject of Mesmerism, as then attracting the notice of Edinburgh in the form of phreno-magnetism. His friend Theophilus, probably the most learned and brawny theologian now in Scotland, called upon him while the manuscript was yet in hand, and it was read. The writer thereupon proposed to mesmerise the hearer, and made a few sportive efforts after the manner of the peripatetic who was then perplexing the town. To his surprise, and also to his confusion as I believe, Theophilus went over! In short, the rhetorician became a mesmerist; the theologian became a patient. It was as difficult as it was strange and even somewhat ludicrous to conceive of such a Titan as our theological hero transmogrified, by a few passes of the hand, into a mere psychological instrument to be played upon by the like of Rheticus and the rest of us; and we were all immensely curious to see the sight, half afraid that Rhea might avenge herself of the insult done to her gigantic child.

An evening was appointed for some experiments to be made in my presence. Accompanied by the late David Scott, who was impenetrably unbelieving of all such things, by a studious person now well-known to the public of the British Quarterly Review, and by a practical chemist accustomed to accuracy of observation, I kept the tryste with eager punctuality. Theophilus, tall, large-boned, with light brown hair and the corresponding complexion, lean, pale, highly nervous, with a brain which is small when compared with his whole bulk, giving the physiologist the idea of a frame too large for its circulatory and cerebro-spinal centres, strong rather than healthy, amazingly accomplished in intellectuals, vigorous in thought, sturdy and eloquent in expression, amiable as a soft young child, pious, and altogether a majestic fellow, sat down on a chair facing towards a window. The intending fascinator shut down the fingers of his right hand, except the fore and middle ones, which he stretched out from his fist like a hay-fork. Raising his hand he placed it before the patient's face in such a direction that the latter could fix his eyes on the tips of the extended fingers. He had not done so a dozen of seconds when the sitter suddenly began to breathe hard and quick and short, to gasp with rapidity; and in less than thirty seconds he fell back entranced, the disturbance of the respiration having subsided as suddenly as it had come on. He was insensible; you might pinch him, prick him with pins, tickle his nostrils with a feather all to no purpose, so you did nothing else :-all which was duly notified by those who were by that evening. This was the completed trance: and it was clearly produced by and within the nervous system of the subject. The finger-points of his friend were nothing more in this case, than the shillings on their left palm were shown to be in the cases related in the last number of the PALLADIUM.

When Rheticus attempted to rouse him by a little shaking and by calling aloud to him, he seemed as if he were going to come out of the trance. But he didn't; he came only a little way out of it. He could hear, speak, answer questions, still keeping his eyes shut, and sitting up in the chair like an automaton, or rather, as Archdeacon Hare suggests, a heteromaton or machine to be moved and swayed by another, man being the only true automaton or self-mover. In this intermediate state

then, in this condition of partial disentrancement, he was allowed to remain for about half-an-hour, while the experimentalist showed us his experiments:-And this is a good place to remark, that it is not in entranced subjects that any of the psychological experiments of the mesmerist are made, but in more or less disentranced or dismesmerised ones. The sense of hearing, the organs of speech, have to be set free. The completed trance is fit only for surgical operations. It is only in different and yet unstudied degrees or stages of dismesmerisation that the psychological wonders are brought out. You might as well make experiments on a statue as on a patient in the completed trance. A similar statement is to be made concerning the more familiar state of the nervous system called sleep. There are no dreams in the state of completed sleep, any more than in death. It is only in the man who is more or less awake that visions and such things transpire; and it is important, as well as curious, to observe that one emerges from sleep and from the mesmeric trance not by a leap, but by a succession of steps or planes. The permanency of the partially dismesmerised states at or on these successive planes, is the very condition, or causa sine quâ non, of the making of what are called mesmeric experiments, from the determination of the acts of a victim by the words of another, up to the catechising of a clear-seer by the inquisitive. And now for our experiments upon the reverend Theophilus Stonehenge, first self-converted in less than a minute into a mere image of himself, and then partially disenchanted by the touch and the voice of his tormentor.

His nervous system was soon found to be in a very peculiar state. He was perfectly self-oblivious, at least he was as little self-conscious as a dreamer who mingles in endless visionary scenes, and yet remembers nothing about them when awake, or rather he was less so, for such a sleeper awakes and knows that he has been dreaming. But it is to be mentioned beforehand, in this case, that the subject not only knew nothing of all that he had been doing and saying during our experiments, but he did not know he had been saying or doing anything whatever. In fact, it was perhaps the most interesting thing that occurred in the course of the evening, to see this highly cultivated man and masterly thinker listening to our recital of his manifestations as if they referred to a third and absent party.

You could play upon that fine and powerful brain as you chose. Theophilus, said the experimentalist, you must understand that Dr Greenhorn has read a paper before the Royal Society which has astonished the bigwigs not a little. I can well believe it, was his quick reply. Yes, he has demonstrated it to be a popular error that it is dangerous to fall from a height. Is it possible? exclaimed he with a tone of conviction. Nay, he has even proved by an undeniable syllogism that the safety of so falling is in the inverse ratio of the height; what do you think of that? Why I must believe what is proved. Well, continued his friend, this room is in the fourth storey of the house as you know, there is the window, will you leap down just to illustrate the thing? Certainly, said the wooden figure with shut eyes; and the window was opened. He rose, bent on his knees, and moved his arms back and forward with clenched fists like one about to spring; and he would certainly have gone over, but for the shutting of the window and

the interference of several strong hands. No man could have acted the settled purpose so much to the life, and certainly not this least mimetic of grave students.

You could initiate any train of thought in him by a word. What of the Eleatic Philosophy? said I; and away he started on a learned disquisition concerning the Eleatic doctrines and schoolmen. But another word, a brief question, stopped him in full career; and away he spinned in the direction indicated by that new conception introduced into him by a phrase. No subject came amiss, philosophical, literary, serious, comical, and even the most foreign to his habits of study and conversation. Midway in an exposition on Mesmerism, which he discoursed upon with fluency, though with no more illumination than he would have done if awake, his friend Rheticus pulled him up by asking if he had heard that Lord John Russell had begun business in the area-flat of the house as a cobbler? No! exclaimed he with wonder, not with a trace of doubt; and then he quietly added that it was not surprising, for his lordship had long been a cobbler in politics.

It is needless to prolong the description, for a word is enough. Suffice it then that you could direct him into any track by a question, by a command, by a phrase. Having been made to pass from one incongruous topic to another, he could not tell you what he had been discussing last. After a number of experiments, he was brought out of the trance by rubbing his brow just over the eyes, from the middle outwards on both sides, and by blowing on his face. As has been noticed above, he knew nothing of all that had transpired. Now this case seems to illustrate the hint thrown out in my former sketch. By a symbol, by a word, you introduced a conception into his mind, or rather (physiologically speaking) into his brain through the mind; everything connected with that conception in him arrayed itself around or radiated from it by the law of association; and having been bidden, he poured it out. This is not materialism of course, for nobody is better aware than the psychologist that there are physiological or cerebral conditions to all thinking. As for the idealist in philosophy, he has only to translate my phraseology into his own dialect, and it will hold good for him also; just as the language of the theory of caloric, for example, continues to be a very good representative expression of the truth for the chemist who has abandoned that theory, and who refers the phenomena of heat to a force and not to a fluid.

Wishing to attempt the production of clear-seeing in this interesting patient, I begged him to let me mesmerise him, and he kindly consented. Having first thrown him over by the very same means as had been used by his friend, I held my hands a few minutes over the two sides of his head, moving them from place to place without effort, but never allowing them to touch his hair, with a view to deepen the trance as I thought. I cannot say that I was sensible of any fluid or influence passing from me to him, but neither can I assert that there was no such transference. I merely acted on a hint I had drawn from the work of M. Teste, a French mesmerist; and there was certainly no sensible sign of anything like action and reaction going on between the subject's head and my fingers. I am not at all clear that those passes of mine over his brain had anything to do with what followed. On being finally

called out of this second trance, he suffered from headache; and we could not ask him to submit again, nor have I had another opportunity of making any more experiments. But before his restoration to himself on this occasion, there ensued the following dialogue between us:

Without rousing him in any other way, I addressed him in a compressed whisper. "I wish you to go to London," said I. " Well, I am there." "You must now go to the Greenwich Railway." "But I don't know the road." "Ask that policeman." "He has told me," said he, sitting up as before with his eyes shut. "I am at the terminus now," continued he." "Well, you must take your place." "I've done so." "Off you gothen," said I with perfect gravity. He then made a long half-whistle, expressive of rapid motion, and said "Now we're down." I desired him to proceed to such and such a house in such and such a street. He said he had gone, and then there followed a dim unsatisfactory account of the house, its whereabouts and its arrangements, but nothing particular or emphatic. He was now called out of his trance, or rather his partial trance; but he knew not a word of our conversation, and laughed at what we told him he had been saying as heartily as any of his observers. It is by no means clear that this was a case of clear-seeing. If it were, it was a very obscure one. It might perhaps have been more pronounced if I had known better how to manage him. It is to be noticed however that I knew all the road he had gone. It was to a house I had once lived in that he was sent. Images of the way and of the house were in my mind, that is to say (physiologically speaking) in my brain, while he strove to do my bidding. It may therefore have been an instance of what certain authors have called double consciousness, a case in which the subject sees nothing the image of which is not present in the cerebro-spinal axes or nervous systems of the operator and himself. It is to be confessed however that the present example is not very significant as a specimen of the higher phenomena of Mesmerism, but it is curious in itself; and it is particularly memorable as connected with a man so widely known, esteemed and loved as the gifted subject of these experiments. It is recorded more on that account than on any other. Be it remembered however that those phenomena, which may be less striking to the spectator, are often the most useful to the investigator for that very reason. It is in her transitions, her middle states, her passages from one phenomenal sphere to another, that the secret of nature is most likely to be caught.

Some time before these observations were made, there had been brought to Edinburgh a young woman who had been found at Glasgow to be susceptible of a highly lucid state, as the mesmerists call it. Her name was Mary Tod, a clairvoyante or clear-seer who excited not a little sensation wherever she went, so long as her susceptibility continued. Some time before her first child was born however, for unfortunately for the curious she was married, her lucidity departed from her. Her husband and she had been making money as usual by her powers, if such they may be called; but they ceased while their possessors were living by them from city to city in England. Tod and his wife were thus suddenly reduced to common work and even poverty. A friend of mine found them in very needy circumstances owing to this calamity, since it must be called so for the nonce, and very properly

argued that it was a proof of their joint integrity in the mesmeric portion of their little career.

My curiosity concerning poor Mary had been excited some time before I saw her. I heard of her from all sorts of people, as seeing absent persons and things, as describing distant houses and rooms with particular accuracy, as telling excited questioners something of their past lives, as puzzling everybody, amazing some and terrifying a few. They told me how she had been sent to see me; how she had described my person, costume and occupation; how she notified most unusual and eccentric arrangements in my house; how she had counted the number of books on a shelf in one of my working rooms; and how in short she watched and reported me, though we were some three miles apart. At last I went to see her at the house of an eminent physician. Our company consisted of one of the present professors of theology in the College of Edinburgh, of four doctors of medicine, of two advocates and of one practical chemist. She was a very ordinary young woman to look at, very unintelligent to speak to, and every way an inferior person. Heavy, bashful, stupid-looking, she was of a lymphatic habit of body, doughy complexion, dingy brown hair and clumsy make. Entranced in a few seconds, she immediately sat up, fixed and statuesque, and as unlike the thing she had been some moments before as could well be conceived. In this state she responded to questions, quietly and fairly put, in a manner not to be forgotten. It seemed to me that she emerged from the completed trance into this partially disentranced state spontaneously. She sat up of her own accord. In a similar manner certain sleepers either never go into completed common sleep, or at once spring back to one or other of the dreaming levels.

Many questions were put to her by different people that night, but I shall record only one experiment. While one of our friends was engaged with her, having desired her to go into the library of the house, and while she was in the act of describing a case of stuffed birds there, which she had never seen, a well-known physician and I went to the said library without telling the rest of the company. The room was dark, we began boxing one another, he left me, I went on my knees and spoke one of King Lear's adjurations. On returning to my friends, I learned that she had suddenly stopped in her description of the birds, and exclaimed in her compressed whisper-"Oh, there is the strange man with the long hair, he lives in the queer house three miles away— and the little man, they are fighting-the little one has gone away. Oh, it is not good, it is not good, he has gone on the ground, he is saying bad words, I will go to him, it is not good." She had thereupon risen to stop my dramatic invocation, and that in a state of high excitement, but they had immediately dismesmerised her.

Being desirous of examining this patient in circumstances more favourable to a scientific investigation, I had her out to the "queer house three miles away." My only assistants were the reviewer and the practical chemist already mentioned; and everything was done with order, while the results were written down at the time. But it is difficult to retain one's self-possession in such circumstances, when one is almost wholly inexperienced. We therefore made no observations of any scientific value; but our experiments, though not a whit better than