perience it every day and every hour.'
And a little after, he adds: 'At the moment I dictate this letter, I
see you with the eyes of my mind, without your being present, or your
knowing anything about it; and I represent to myself, through my
knowledge of your character, the impression that my words will make
on your mind, without nevertheless knowing or being able to understand
how all this passes within me.'

"I think, sir, you will require nothing more precise than these words
of St. Augustine to persuade you that we must attribute to the power
of imagination the greater number of apparitions, even of those
through which we learn things which it would seem could not be known
naturally; and you will easily excuse my undertaking to explain to you
how the imagination works all these wonders, since this holy doctor
owns that he cannot himself comprehend it, though quite convinced of
the fact.

"I can tell you only that the blood which circulates incessantly in
our arteries and veins, being purified and warmed in the heart, throws
out thin vapors, which are its most subtile parts, and are called
animal spirits; which, being carried into the cavities of the brain,
set in motion the small gland which is, they say, the seat of the
soul, and by this means awaken and resuscitate the species of the
things that they have heard or seen formerly, which are, as it were,
enveloped within it, and form the internal reasoning which we call
thought. Whence comes it that beasts have memory as well as ourselves,
but not the reflections which accompany it, which proceed from the
soul, and that they have not.

"If what Mr. Digby, a learned Englishman, and chancellor of Henrietta,
Queen of England, Father Kircher, a celebrated Jesuit, Father Schort,
of the same society, Gaffarelli and Vallemont, publish of the
admirable secret of the palingenesis, or resurrection of plants, has
any foundation, we might account for the shades and phantoms which
many persons declare to have seen in cemeteries.

"This is the way in which these curious researchers arrive at the
marvelous operation of the palingenesis:--

"They take a flower, burn it, and collect all the ashes of it, from
which they extract the salts by calcination. They put these salts into
a glass phial, wherein having mixed certain compositions capable of
setting them in motion when heated, all this matter forms a dust of a
bluish hue; of this dust, excited by a gentle warmth, arises a s