ng lost. The presentation of a second golden
touch-piece was alleged to be effective in subduing the scrofula.

The following announcement appeared in the "Public Intelligencer," under
date of Whitehall, May 14, 1664:

"His Sacred Majesty, having declared it to be his Royal will and purpose
to continue the healing of his People for the Evil during the month of
May, and then to give over till Michaelmas next, I am commanded to give
notice thereof, that the people may not come up to Town in the interim
and lose their labour."

Charles II is said to have found the practice extremely lucrative. It is
not surprising that many practitioners in those days were credited with
having wrought marvellous cures.

We know that the undoubted influence of the mind on the body, and the
power of suggestion and expectant attention, apply only to subjective
states and functional ailments. Thus it is intelligible why so many
people of education and culture, on the principle that seeing is
believing, were able to testify to miraculous cures in their own
experience.[86:1]

William Andrews, in "Historic Romance," says that the records of the
Town of Preston, Lancashire, show that the local Corporation voted
grants of money to enable patients to make the journey to London, to be
touched for the evil. In the year 1682 bailiffs were instructed to "pay
unto James Harrison, bricklayer, ten shillings, towards carrying his son
to London, in order to the procuring of His Majesty's touch." Again, in
1687, being the third year of James II, when the King was at Chester,
the Preston Town Council passed a vote, ordering the payment to two
young women, of five shillings each, "towards their charge in going to
Chester to get His Majesty's touch."

Thomas Cartwright, Bishop of Chester, wrote in his diary, August 27,
1687: "I was at His Majesty's levee, from whence, at nine o'clock, I
attended him into the closet, where he healed three hundred and fifty
persons."

Queen Anne (1702-1714) was the last of the English sovereigns who
exercised the royal prerogative of healing by laying-on of hands. She
made an official announcement in the London "Gazette," March 12, 1712,
of her intention to "touch publicly." Samuel Johnson, then a child of
about three years of age, was one of the last who tested the efficacy of
this superstitious rite, and without success. Acting upon the advice of
Sir John Floyer, a noted physician of Lichfield, Mrs. Johnson took her
son