ry considerable. To the ignorant the scene
was full of wonderment.

To ourselves, regarding it from our present vantage-ground, it contains
absolutely nothing of the marvellous. We discern the means which were in
operation, and which are theoretically sufficient to produce the result.
Those means consisted in,--first, high-wrought expectation and excited
fancy, enough alone to set some of the most excitable into
fits;--secondly, the contagious power of nervous disorder to cause the
like disorder in others, a power augmenting with the number of persons
infected;--thirdly, the physical influence upon the body of the _Od
force_ discovered by Von Reichenbach, which is produced in abundance by
chemical decomposition, which can be communicated to, and conveyed by
inanimate conductors, and which finally emanates with great vivacity
from the subtle chemistry of the living human frame itself. The reality
of this third cause you must allow me to take for granted without
farther explanation. Von Reichenbach's papers, the credit of which is
guaranteed by their publication in Liebig and Woehler's Annals of
Chemistry, have been now some time translated into English, and are in
the hands of most English readers.

It is remarkable that Jussieu, the most competent judge in the
commission which, in 1784 condemned mesmerism as a scientific
imposition, was so much struck with the effects he witnessed, that he
recommended the subject, nevertheless, to the farther investigation of
medical men. His objections were to the theory. He laid it down, in the
separate report which he made, that the only physical cause in operation
was animal heat; curiously overlooking the point, that common heat was
not capable of doing the same things, and that, therefore, the effects
_must be owing to the agency of that something else_ which animal heat
contained in addition to common heat.

It is unnecessary to follow Mesmer through his minor performances. The
relief sometimes obtained by stroking diseased parts with the hand had
before been proclaimed by Dr Greatorex, whose pretensions had no less an
advocate than the Honourable Robert Boyle. The extraordinary tales of
Mesmer's immediate and instantaneous personal power over individuals are
probably part exaggeration, part the real result of his confidence and
practice in the use of the means he wielded. Mesmer died in 1815.

Among his pupils, when at the zenith of his fame, was the Marquis de
Puysegur. Ret