a great deal more important for the world, than the phenomena of the
lay Hatha-Yogis. These gifts are purely psychic: to the knowledge of
the Hatha-Yogis the Raj-Yogis add the whole scale of mental phenomena.
Sacred books ascribe to them the following gifts: foreseeing future
events; understanding of all languages; the healing of all diseases; the
art of reading other people's thoughts; witnessing at will everything
that happens thousands of miles from them; understanding the language
of animals and birds; Prakamya, or the power of keeping up youthful
appearance during incredible periods of time; the power of abandoning
their own bodies and entering other people's frames; Vashitva, or the
gift to kill, and to tame wild animals with their eyes; and, lastly, the
mesmeric power to subjugate any one, and to force any one to obey the
unexpressed orders of the Raj-Yogi.

Dr. Paul has witnessed the few phenomena of Hatha-Yoga already
described; there are many others about which he has heard, and which
he neither believes nor disbelieves. But he guarantees that a Yogi can
suspend his breath for forty-three minutes and twelve seconds.

Nevertheless, European scientific authorities maintain that no one can
suspend the breath for more than two minutes. O science! Is it possible
then that thy name is also vanitas vanitatum, like the other things of
this world?

We are forced to suppose that, in Europe, nothing is known about the
means which enabled the philosophers of India, from times immemorial,
gradually to transform their human frames.

Here are a few deep words of Professor Boutleroff, a Russian scientist
whom I, in common with all Russians, greatly respect: "....All this
belongs to knowledge; the increase of the mass of knowledge will
only enrich and not abolish science. This must be accomplished on the
strength of serious observation, of study, of experience, and under the
guidance of positive scientific methods, by which people are taught to
acknowledge every other phenomenon of nature. We do not call you blindly
to accept hypotheses, after the example of bygone years, but to seek
after knowledge; we do not invite you to give up science, but to enlarge
her regions..."

This was said about spiritualist phenomena. As to the rest of our
learned physiologists, this is, approximately, what they have the
right to say: "We know well certain phenomena of nature which we have
personally studied and investigated, under certain c