counts for the facts more easily than your mysterious talk of "passes," "mesmeric currents," "magnetic fluids," and sympathetic "rapports."

I have myself been under a somewhat celebrated operator's hands; and nothing came of it. I am so far, however, from being incredulous on that account, as to the facts of which you speak, that I can the more readily credit them: for though I do not admit that they are due to some mysterious influence on the operator's part, I am inclined to believe, from my own perience, that there is perhaps no one who might not be brought into a condition of catalepsy by subjection of the optic nerve, or possibly any other surface of sensation, to prolonged and monotonous stimulation.

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Nay, though the mesmerist's operation (by the influence which the fancy or nervous susceptibility of the patient may give to him), may facilitate the result, I believe that it might generally be produced without any operation at all; the effect being more or less rapidly induced, and more or less marked, according to the constitutional peculiarities of the individual. I quite believe that if a man, even by himself, were to fix his eyes intensely on a small bright disk without winking, he would after a time find himself (or rather be found) in a state of catalepsy. Some of the familiar experiments we have most of us made, or seen made, with birds, when we were school boys,- and the initial sensations which any man, alone, may induce in himself at will, by playing similar scientific pranks, confirm me in this suspicion. I have heard of a man involuntarily playing the mesmerist on himself, while intently watching delayed signals of the electric telegraph; the intense unbroken gaze at length terminated in a fit of catalepsy; and I can easily credit it. Probably there is no man, however strong his nerves, who could endure an indefinitely prolonged unwinking gaze on a small defined disk without becoming unconscious; the trial with the human eye is still more difficult, as boys who attempt the feat of "staring each other out of countenance soon find. Certainly, when I underwent my mesmerist's gaze, I felt how easily the condition might be superinduced in men of weak nerves; and that habit and

power of endurance alone would settle the question as to which was the operator and which the patient. It might well happen, I fancy, that the operator if he chanced to meet with a sturdy customer, might find himself operated upon instead of operating, -conjugating the "passive" instead of the "active" voice. At all events, I doubt whether any man's eye could bear, without being refreshed and brushed each moment (as nature intends it should) by nictation, to gaze for an unlimited time on a small bright disk; and I do not doubt, that if compelled to do so, the phenomena of your mesmeric catalepsy-or something resembling it-would supervene. And it is very possible that the same might happen if the auditory nerve, or some limited portion of the tactual surface, were similarly subjected to an unvarying stimulus. Variety of sensation and variety of thought are essential to us; and mind and body bear testimony to the same peculiarity of our constitution. The same thought would soon drive us mad; and continued intense iteration of the same sound, if it did not force poor mind to take refuge in sleep, would, I fancy, force it to take refuge in catalepsy.

You see, therefore, that so far from denying those "facts" of mesmerists about which you make so much noise, I believe them to be more universal than you do; I also admit them to be very curious and worthy of investigation, though not more so than those of somnambulism; only I do not believe that they flow from some mysterious "influence" of your scientific hierophants, whom I place, pace tuâ, on the same footing with fortune-tellers or conjurers.

Whether it be wise to superinduce any abnormal state like that of artificial catalepsy, whether it is always safe to do so,-I have my doubts; at least we should not for the sake of mere curiosity.

Such are my views of ordinary "mesmeric" phenomena; but as to what you call "clairvoyance," whereby men, it seems, may see with the back of their heads, and read out of their toes, I regard it as unsophisticated nonsense.

Yours truly,

R. E. H. G.

LETTER LXXIV.

To the Same.

Nov. 1851.

My dear Friend,

I am not a little amused by your putting me on the defensive. When you ask me how, as a disciple of the Inductive Philosophy, I can call the alleged facts of "clairvoyance" in question, I answer at once that it is precisely because I am such. You say that the incomprehensibility of the facts is no reason for their rejection; it is quite true, but nothing to the purpose. What I want is the facts; undoubted, well-authenticated facts. That people can read (or rather divine what is in a book) with their eyes shut; tell what is doing at a given moment, by people they have never seen, in a house a hundred miles off; send a person, at an equal distance, to sleep by means of a pair of mesmerised gloves,—surely I may be excused for asking stringent proof of such things. You say that there is adequate unimpeachable testimony to such facts, however strange they may be. I answer that when I sift the testimony, I do not find it adequate. I find so much that requires to be at once rejected, that it necessarily casts suspicion on that scanty remainder of quasi facts I cannot account for; and it is more rational to conclude that they are not to be relied upon than that they are. 1st. I see that many of the alleged facts I have heard, and some I have had an opportunity of investigating, have turned out to be absolute trickery; neither better nor worse than a common conjurer's tricks; exactly on a par with the feats of the renowned Sidrophel of "Hudibras," or Cadwallader of "Peregrine Pickle;" and who shall say how many more of your feats of mysterious intelligence are similarly the effect of concert and collusion? 2ndly. Other wonderful stories of the kind, when unswathed from the voluminous folds of exaggeration in which successive reporters have wrapped them (nay, the imagination of even two or three will

often suffice), have shrunk into such minikin proportions that we can hardly see anything wonderful at all. What B has unconsciously given to the narrative of A, and C to that of B, and D to that of C, has made something portentous in the accuracy of a clairvoyant's responses; when the real facts, at last got at, show only some vague relation between question and answer, or, it may be, something like a curious coincidence. The glowing imagination of an enthusiast can unconsciously shape these ductile and fluent elements into what it will; I say, unconsciously-for it may all be done without lying. 3rdly. Though most desirous of seeing some of those wonderful things you say you have undoubtedly witnessed, they have somehow always escaped me. I have unluckily seen no phenomena which need, for their solution, any such hypothesis as yours. You say, "seeing is believing," and that you have seen; I answer, perhaps so; but I have not seen; and in such a case, and in such ragged condition of the testimony, "not seeing" is (or ought to be) "not believing." 4thly. I find that another large deduction from the reported facts is to be made on another score,-the credulity of spectators. I find that if clairvoyant conjurers find any difficulty in bamboozling their audience, their audience often take the trouble off their hands by bamboozling themselves; they like to be duped, and duped they are. A little while ago a shrewd friend of mine (a medical man), at an evening exhibition of the "phenomena," got near a clairvoyante who was conveniently en rapport with the chief exhibitor. She, my friend was told, would and could say, nothing except through the exhibitor as the medium. My friend, however, kept near, and while Mr. Exhibitor was befooling his gaping audience, threw her off her guard, and got the dumb lady to speak. The meeting broke up in most admired disorder; but, what thanks did my friend get for unmasking the cheat? Just this "Confound that Mr. — ; what right had he to put in his oar? He has completely spoiled the evening!" Are not such things almost enough to make one say-"Populus vult decipi et decipiatur?" 5thly. Your experiments are all of the "tentative" character; not only do they generally issue in

nothing that needs investigation, but they oftener issue in nothing than not. Pardon me for saying that your enthusiasm wholly runs away with you when you so rashly affirm, that if you reject the phenomena of clairvoyance, you must reject the miracles of the New Testament! It is impossible to imagine anything more ludicrously unlike than the two things. Not only is the testimony for the Scripture miracles utterly dissimilar from that for your pretended wonders, in the several respects I have already mentioned, but in this last it is diametrically opposite. If I found that Christ and His apostles professed, like the Catholics at the tomb of the Abbé de Paris, to perform miracles only of a "tentative" character;-if they sometimes tried to heal the sick, and more frequently failed than not; to cure epilepsy or bad eyes, and only now and then succeeded, I should know what to think of the matter; I should think it more probable that the precarious success in a few cases was owing to favourable circumstances in the patients-to the conditions of the nervous system, and the character of the disease-than to any supernatural power. I should think the symptoms yielded to the influence of faith and imagination in the patient (as in many diseases they often will), not to the power of the thaumaturge. And even so, when I find that in the greater number of your exhibitions none of the wonderful things promised are done, I naturally attribute a few seeming prodigies to lucky guesses, curious coincidences, accident or fraud, rather than to any mysterious powers in your uncertain wonder-workers. 6thly. I am compelled to argue thus when I find that none of your clairvoyants can or will solve any of the simple riddles proposed to them; for not a soul of you would even hazard a guess at the number of that bank note in the Dublin Bank, which was promised to the happy guesser; as I also hereby promise to make you or any of your friends a present of the bank note at which I am now looking, if you will but tell me either the bank, the number, or the date! In such cases there is at least a chance of success, and yet none of you will seize it. How confounding, again, are the failures in the case of Sir John Franklin! He ought to have