aire. He
was admitted, looked at the prisoners, and picked out as the murderer a
little hunchback (had the children described a hunchback?) who had just
been brought in for a small theft. The hunchback was taken to Lyons, and
he was recognised, on the way, by the people at all the stages where he
had stopped. At Lyons he was examined in the usual manner, and confessed
that he had been an accomplice in the crime, and had guarded the door.
Aymar pursued the other culprits to the coast, followed them by sea,
landed where they had landed, and only desisted from his search when they
crossed the frontier. As for the hunchback, he was broken on the wheel,
being condemned on his own confession. It does not appear that he was
put to the torture to make him confess. If this had been done his
admissions would, of course, have been as valueless as those of the
victims in trials for witchcraft.

This is, in brief, the history of the famous Lyons murders. It must be
added that many experiments were made with Aymar in Paris, and that they
were all failures. He fell into every trap that was set for him;
detected thieves who were innocent, failed to detect the guilty, and
invented absurd excuses; alleging, for example, that the rod would not
indicate a murderer who had confessed, or who was drunk when he committed
his crime. These excuses seem to annihilate the wild contemporary theory
of Chauvin and others, that the body of a murderer naturally exhales an
invisible matiere meurtriere--peculiar indestructible atoms, which may be
detected by the expert with the rod. Something like the same theory, we
believe, has been used to explain the pretended phenomena of haunted
houses. But the wildest philosophical credulity is staggered by a
matiere meurtriere which is disengaged by the body of a sober, but not by
that of an intoxicated, murderer, which survives tempests in the air, and
endures for many years, but is dissipated the moment the murderer
confesses. Believers in Aymar have conjectured that his real powers were
destroyed by the excitements of Paris, and that he took to imposture; but
this is an effort of too easy good-nature. When Vallemont defended Aymar
(1693) in the book called 'La Physique Occulte,' he declared that Aymar
was physically affected to an unpleasant extent by matiere meurtriere,
but was not thus agitated when he used the rod to discover minerals. We
have seen that, if modern evidence can be trusted, holde