useful to himself
personally. He was on the point of embarking, when he found on the
shore the corpse of an unknown person, as yet without sepulture.
Simonides had him interred, from humanity. The next night the dead man
appeared to Simonides, and, through gratitude, counseled him not to
embark in the vessel then riding in the harbor, because he would be
shipwrecked if he did. Simonides believed him, and a few days after,
he heard of the wreck of the vessel in which he was to have embarked.

John Pico de la Mirandola assures us in his treatise, _De Auro_, that
a man, who was not rich, finding himself reduced to the last
extremity, and without any resources either to pay his debts or
procure nourishment for a numerous family in a time of scarcity,
overcome with grief and uneasiness, fell asleep. At the same time, one
of the blessed appeared to him in a dream, taught him by some
enigmatical words the means of making gold, and pointed out to him at
the same moment the water he must make use of to succeed in it. On his
awaking, he took some of that water, and made gold of it, in small
quantity, indeed, but enough to maintain his family. He made some
twice with iron, and three times with orpiment. "He has convinced me
by my own eyes," says Pico de la Mirandola, "that the means of making
gold artificially is not a falsehood, but a true art."

Here is another sort of apparition of one living man to another, which
is so much the more singular, because it proves at once the might of
spells, and that a magician can render himself invisible to several
persons, while he discovers himself to one man alone. The fact is
taken from the Treatise on Superstitions, of the reverend father Le
Brun,[414] and is characterized by all which can render it
incontestible. On Friday, the first day of May, 1705, about five
o'clock in the evening, Denis Misanger de la Richardiere, eighteen
years of age, was attacked with an extraordinary malady, which began
by a sort of lethargy. They gave him every assistance that medicine
and surgery could afford. He fell afterwards into a kind of furor or
convulsion, and they were obliged to hold him, and have five or six
persons to keep watch over him, for fear that he should throw himself
out of the windows, or break his head against the wall. The emetic
which they gave him made him throw up a quantity of bile, and for four
or five days he remained pretty quiet.

At the end of the month of May, they sent him