traits of affinity. Mental aberration is inexhaustible in the variety of its perverting effects on the judgment; the intellectual vagaries of one madman have nothing in common with those of another. But in the dreamings of these demonomaniacs there is no variety; a sameness, suggestive of one knows not what vague and fearful suspicion, characterizes them. The weight of a nightmare seems to gather on your breast as you read, and the question, often silenced, keeps again and again recurring, "Is there nowhere is there not, perhaps, in some dark region of my own being-a reality corresponding to all this?"

No doubt, there is such a reality; and we think that the mesmeric phenomena yield a clue, by which we may advance some one or two steps, at least, in the direction in which it lies. Whatever the psychic state of the witches and demonopathics of the middle ages was, into the same state does the agency of mesmerism throw the person on whom it is brought to bear. It is a state sui generis; a state, without any question, of great nervous disturbance, but of which no familiar form of nervous disease supplies us with a definition. It is a state which, perhaps, discloses to man the heaven or the hell within him, peopled with "spirits of health," or with "goblins damned," that are but multiplied reflections, or magic lantern shadows, of his inner self, mirroring back to him his own "intents, wicked or charitable," and symbolically indicating how much of the angel or of the demon he has in his nature. And this is just what Schubert, under whose guidance we are glad to put ourselves in the "palpable obscure" of such bottomless questions, thinks of animal magnetism. Hear how he discourses upon it, in his "Views of the Dark Side of Natural Science"-views which we cannot quite agree with Friedrich Rückert in thinking "only calculated for people with owls' eyes."

"When the remembrance of the past -all that we have seen and suffered, learned and known-are become faint in us, yea, when they seem to be quite blotted out, and there comes a moment of inward lucidity, and all the longdimmed, long-forgotten stands suddenly before the soul, in the freshness of the first impression; or when the history

of a whole past eventful life is reviewed in a moment, the occurrences that followed one another in succession of time, ranging themselves, as it were, side by side in one great picture;-where, we would know, had that inward world so long hid itself? Who would not wish that a microscope were found, which might unveil to us the secrets of this dark region? And such

a microscope we possess, in the observations of what is called vital magnetism, and of the phenomena related to it. However often, owing to the scanty light that can be brought upon the subject, unconscious, or even intentional deceptions and impositions, have mixed themselves up in these observations, important, and worthy of attention, they must, nevertheless, remain, inasmuch as they lay open to our view, one after another, the inner spheres of our being; though it is not to be forgotten, that the inmost and highest of those spheres lie beyond their range."

Doctor Calmeil, in his work on Epidemic Insanity, of which an account appeared in the second number of the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science, is at some pains to show the connexion between the mesmeric and the demonopathic phenomena. We quote the following from the review :

"In the case of the Ursulines in Lou

don, many "séances" took place, attended by crowds of amateurs, among whom was the Duke of Orleans himself. They witnessed abundant examples of the truth of mesmerism.' Madame de Sazilli was exorcised in the presence of the prince: the exorcist commanded the demon to render the entire body of the patient as supple as a slip of lead; he then folded the trunk into a variety of forms, in each of which she was retained immoveable. During this time, respiration could hardly be perceived; and this lady felt no pain, although her arms were pierced through with pins. The Duke having made a secret communication to the exorcist, the patient at once fulfilled the order; and this phenomenon,' says Calmeil, 'one of the exploits of modern mesmerism— this reading the thoughts of the magnetizer was produced in hundreds of instances.'

"At Auxonne, somnambulism was produced at the command of the exorcists, or happened at the hour predicted by their suffering companions. The bishop of Chalons having commanded the demon who possessed Madame Denise to suspend her sensibility and render her

inaccessible to suffering, they were able to run pins under the roots of her nails, without producing the slightest sign of pain. The exorcist had the power, not only of paralyzing all the senses, but of restoring them collectively or singly, as he saw fit. The most unlimited power was exercised over the muscles."

"In the case of Rensie Pausot, the

bishop directed dans le fond de sa pensée,' that she should come to him to be exorcised. She lived in a distant quarter of the town, but came to him immediately, saying that she did so in obedience to his commands. This happened repeatedly. Phenomena of the same class were observed in the epidemic of demonopathy in Bayeux, in 1732.

"In one case, the patient, who had previously abandoned the study of Latin, comprehended all the orders of the exorcist, provided they were given while she was in the state of somnambulism. In this or the ecstatic condition, even the application of fire produced apparently no pain, and the patients exhibited all the symptoms of clairvoyance, describing the interiors of houses far removed from them, and in many of which they had never been."

We find some difficulty in understanding the reasoning of Doctor Calmeil, or of his Irish reviewer, on the facts stated in the above extracts. The use made of those facts is to prove that there is no such thing as clairvoyance, and the proof consists in showing that an unequivocal clairvoyance was exhibited by the possessed nuns. By logic equally peculiar, it is demonstrated that "the knowledge of the thoughts of those en rapport' with the patient is a chimera, for the possessed nuns showed this knowledge "in hundreds of cases;" and that "the power of the magnetizer to produce various conditions at will" is equally illusory, for this power was exercised over the possessed nuns by the exorcists in the most unlimited way.

The only mesmeric phenomena which Calmeil admits to be "real" are-1st, the magnetic sleep; and 2nd, insensibility to pain. But by his own principles, these also ought to be included in the category of the chimerical, since they were both manifested by the possessed nuns, as well as by the witches of those times. Eusèbe Salverte, whose shallow book

on the "Occult Sciences" has been recently made known to the English reader by the translation of Doctor Anthony Thomson, would not go even so far as Calmeil in his concessions to mesmerism. With him it has no "real phenomena;" and the insensibility to pain, which he does not deny the mediæval sufferers for sorcery to have unequivocally shown, he resolves into a mere effect of narcotic potions or unguents. The lupis memphiticus, Salverte informs us, on the authority of Dioscorides, was used in Egypt to produce insensibility in parts of the body which were to be subjected to painful operations in surgery; and its efficacy was the same, whether employed internally or externally. He thinks it probable that Hindoo widows are rendered insensible by some such means before undergoing the terrors of the Suttee. But we will let him speak on this point for himself, and in the English utterance which Doctor Thomson has lent him:

"The eye-witness of one of these sacrifices, which took place in July, 1822, saw the victim arrive in a complete state of bodily insensibility, the effect, no doubt, of the drugs which had been administered to her. Her eyes were open, but she did not appear to see; and in a weak voice, and as if mechanically, she answered the legal questions that were put to her regarding the full liberty of her sacrifice. When she was laid on the pile, she was absolutely insensible. The Christians carried this secret from the East into Europe, on the return of the Crusaders. It was probably known to the subaltern magicians, as well as that of braving the action of fire, from which I imagine arose the rule of jurisprudence, according to which, physical insensibility, whether partial or general, was a certain sign of sorcery. Many authors quoted by Fromann speak of the unhappy sorcerers who have laughed or slept through the agonies of torture; and they have not failed to add, that they were sent to sleep by the power of the devil.

"It is also said, that the same advantage was enjoyed by pretended sorcerers about the middle of the fifteenth century. Nicholas Eymeric, Grand Inquisitor of Arragon, author of the famous Directoire des Inquisiteurs, loudly complained of the sorceries practised by accursed persons, through the aid of which, when put to the torture, they appeared absolutely insensible. Fr. Pegna, who wrote a commentary on

Eymeric's work in 1578, believed, also, the reality and efficacy of the sorceries. He strengthens himself by the evidence of the inquisitor Grillandus, and Hippolytus de Marsilies. The latter, who was Professor of Jurisprudence at Bologna in 1524, positively declares, in his Pratique Criminelle,' that he had seen the effect of the philters upon the accused persons, who suffered no pain, but appeared to be asleep in the midst of the tortures. The expressions he makes use of are remarkable; they describe the insensible man, as if plunged into a torpor more like the effect produced by an opiate, than the proud bearing which is the result of a perseverance superior to every pain."

"To many instances of this temporary insensibility, Wierius adds an important observation; he saw a woman thus inaccessible to the power of torture; her face was black, and her eyes were starting out, as if she had been strangled; her exemption from suffering was due to a species of apoplexy. A physician, who witnessed a similar state of insensibility, compares it to fits, epileptic or apoplectic.'

M. Salverte further cites Taboureau, who was the king's counsel at the bailiwick of Dijon in 1585, to the effect that it was almost useless to put the "question" to the persons accused of necromancy. All the jailers, he complains, were acquainted with the stupifying recipe, and they did not fail to communicate it to the prisoners. The secret, according to Taboureau, consisted in swallowing soap dissolved in water; but this was evidently a mystification practised on the worthy king's counsel, whom it is probable that the possessors of so precious a secret saw no good reason to initiate into the mysteries of their order. It might, our author suggests, have been opium, henbane, belladonna, aconite, solanum, or stramonium, all of which have been used to deaden pain in surgical operations. Or might it not have been something analogous to the late discovery of ether-inhalation? Professor Schoenbein, the inventor of the guncotton, is said to have found a means of producing insensibility without the dangerous effects attending the use of ether who knows but it is some of the witch-ointments, the composition of which may have been traditionally preserved in Germany from the dark ages?

But it was not only for deadening the sense of pain that unguents were

in use among the practitioners of magical arts. Another purpose to which they were made subservient was the producing of visions; and so vivid was the imagery conjured up in this way, that no persuasion could afterwards bring the dreamer to the belief that what they had witnessed was not reality. On this subject, we quote again from Salverte

"Experiments have decidedly proved that several medicaments, administered in the form of liniments, are taken in by the absorbent system, and act upon the habit in the same manner as when they are directly introduced into the stomach. This property of liniments was not unknown to the ancients. In the romance of Achilles Tatius, an Egyptian doctor, in order to cure Leucippus of an attack of frenzy, applied to his head a liniment composed of oil, in which some particular medicament was dissolved. The patient fell into a deep sleep, shortly after the anointing. What the physician was acquainted with, the Thaumaturgist could scarcely be ignorant of; and this secret knowledge endowed him with the power of peforming many apparent miracles.

Before consulting the oracle of Trophonius, the body was rubbed with oil; this preparation undoubtedly concurred in producing the desired vision. Before being admitted to the mysteries of the Indian sages, Apollonius and his companions were anointed with an oil, the strength of which made them imagine that they were bathed with fire.

"The priests of Mexico, preparatory to their conversing with their divinity, anointed their bodies with a fœtid pomatum. The base of it was tobacco, and a bruised seed called Ololuchqui, the effect of which was to deprive man of his judgment, as that of the tobacco was to benumb his senses. After this, they felt themselves very intrepid, and not less cruel; and, no doubt, predisposed to have visions, since the intention of this practice was to bring them into connection with the objects of their fantastical worship."

In order to be transported to their sabbath, the witches had to rub themselves with an oil or pomatum, which, according to their own account before the Inquisition, was composed of the water that exudes from a toad in a state of irritation.

A woman at Florence, who was accused of sorcery, pleaded guilty to the charge, and declared that she would be present at the witch-sabbath

that very night, if it were permitted her to make use of the magic unguent. Having got permission, she rubbed her body with a foetid composition, and presently fell into a profound torpor, from which neither blows, pricking, nor scorching-all of which were liberally administered-could arouse her. Next day, on coming to herself, she related that she had been to the sabbath, and described the painful sensations which she had really experienced in her sleep, as connected with things done to her in the infernal assembly. The magistrate considered this as a proof that she was no witch at all, and that her visits to the sabbath were mere dreams. It is evident that her insensibility was not complete, as she was conscious of pain, caused by the experiments actually made on her power of sensation, but, as in all such cases, referred by her to the visionary creations of her own haunted brain. Sal.. verte relates the story after Paolo Minucci, a Florentine lawyer of the sixteenth century. The most obvious reflection it suggests is, that the accused was singularly happy in her judge, who, on no better grounds than the having had her bodily before him the whole night, thought himself justified in withholding belief from her own avowal, that she had attended the conclave of sorcerers. It would not have been wonderful if such incredulity had involved the judge himself in a suspicion of being no stranger to the hellish league. For the solution of the difficulty, in accordance with the spirit of the age, would have been, that if the witch's body did not go to the sabbath, her soul did; and, indeed, there were authorities of weight for the opinion that it was the soul that generally did take part in those scenes of impiety and uncleanness, and that the anointing had merely the effect of keeping the body in tenantable condition, until the return of its volatile inmate.

Of this opinion is Mr. Joseph Glanvil, the learned and reverend author of "Saducismus Triumphatus,”* a work published in the latter part of the seventeenth century, to the eternal discomfiture of all such sceptical Florentine

judges, and others, who would not believe that old women could ride broomsticks, or who thought it unlikely that the devil would spend his time philandering with a bevy of blear-eyed beldams, on heaths, and such out-of-theway places; in an age, too, when, what with Roundheads, and Jesuits, and freethinkers, and merry King Charles and his court, and dull King James and his court, and pious King William, and filial Queen Mary, and their court, one would think he had quite enough of serious business on his hands.

Over such Sadducees does Mr. Glanvil, as the title of his book sufficiently sets forth, triumph. He does not, however, seem to think much, himself, of the achievement; the victory is too cheap; the enemy made a miserable fight of it, and from a field so faintly contested laurels were scarce worth the carrying away. Indeed, in very pity of the weakness of his adversaries, Mr. Glanvil chivalrously takes up their side of the question first, and marshals against himself a far more imposing array of objections than he believes the contrary party to be able to do, if left to their own resources; which objections having with much ease overthrown, he avows his candid conviction that he has suggested much more against what he defends, than ever he heard or saw in any that opposed it; whose discourses for the most part have seemed to him inspired by "a lofty scorn of common belief, and some trivial notions of vulgar philosophy." So that he "professes, for his own part, he never yet heard any of the confident declaimers against witchcraft and apparitions, speak any thing that might move a mind, in any degree instructed in the generous kinds of philosophy and nature of things. And for the objections he has recited, they are most of them such as rose out of his own thoughts, which he obliged to consider what was possible to be said upon this occasion."

In fact, to Mr. Glanvil, the defiance of common sense involved in doubting the existence of witches is so great, that he cannot but look upon those who are guilty of it as furnishing in

themselves an argument of what they deny; and suspects shrewdly that "so confident an opinion could not be held upon such inducements, but by some kind of witchcraft and fascination." "And perhaps," he suggests, "that evil spirit, whose influences they will not allow in actions ascribed to such causes, hath a greater hand and interest in their proposition than they are aware of." For he thinks it the clear interest of this "agent of darkness" to have the world believe that there is no such thing as himself. And as he that thinks there is no witch, believes a devil gratis, so we must count ourselves much beholden to such a one, if he admit either angel or spirit, resurrection of the body, or immortality of the soul. Thus, this witch question is one in which the very vitals of religion are concerned; and if Mr. Glanvil, late Chaplain in Ordinary to His Majesty," did not interest himself about the vitals of religion, who should? Moreover, does he not write himself F.R.S., and has not the question also its scientific side, its bearing on the vitals of philosophy, to which no man of these letters can without blame remain indifferent?

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We quote some of the "Objections," which our author supposes to be made by the Sadducean impugners of his doctrine, together with his triumphant answers to the same. And the objection we will begin with is the one which, we believe, has most weight with the unthinking part of men, and which, when we ourselves belonged to that class, we remember to have been much fortified by, in our resistance to the great verities for which Mr. Glanvil contends.

Here follows the objection :—

"There are actions in most of those relations ascribed to witches, which are ridiculous and impossible in the nature of things; such are (1.) Their flying out of windows, after they have anointed themselves, to remote places. (2.) Their transformation into cats, hares, and other creatures. (3.) Their feeling all the hurts in their own bodies which they have received in those. (4.) Their raising tempests, by muttering some nonsensical words, or performing ceremonies alike impertinent as ridiculous. And (5.) their being sucked in some particular private place of their bodies by a familiar. These are presumed to be actions inconsistent with the nature of spirits, and above the power of those

"None (he remarks) but a fool or a madman would relate, with a purpose of having it believed, that he saw in Ireland men with hoofs on their heads, and eyes in their breasts; or if any should be so ridiculously vain, as to be serious in such an incredible romance, it cannot be supposed that all travellers that come into those parts after him should tell the same story. There is a large field in fiction; and if all these relations were arbitrary compositions, doubtless the first romancers would have framed them more agreeable to the common doctrine of spirits; at least, after these supposed absurdities had been a thousand times laughed at, people by this time would have learned to correct those obnoxious extravagancies; and though they have not yet more veracity than the ages of ignorance and superstition, yet one would expect they should have got more cunning. This supposed impossibility, then, of these performances, seems to me a probable argument that they are not wilful and de.. signed forgeries. And if they are fancies, 'tis somewhat strange, that imagination, which is the most various thing in all the world, should infinitely repeat the same conceit in all times and places."

Having thus made it tolerably plain that a reasonable amount of improbability is one of the best titles that a witch-story can have to our belief-in other words, that its likelihood is in the direct ratio of its unlikelihood— our author proceeds to show that the particular instances of improbability referred to in the "Objection" are not so improbable after all, but may be "as well accounted for by the rules of reason and philosophy, as the ordinary affairs of nature."