its new director having prejudices on the score of
mesmerism, there were difficulties purposely thrown in the way of
my following up that which I had so auspiciously begun."--(Pp.
176-179)

Many of these cases of clairvoyance, given by Mr Townshend, appear on
the face of them ambiguous; thus the reading is said to be effected with
difficulty and imperfectly, the difficulty to be increased by the
superposition of obstacles. Others, as related, certainly admit of no
explanation by deductions from ordinary experience. All we can say of
them, therefore, is, that we have fairly sought to see such phenomena,
and have never succeeded; when we see them, and can properly test them,
we will believe them. But from the internal evidence of the latter
portion of Mr Townshend's book, which we shall presently discuss, we
cannot, although not doubting his honesty of purpose, set our faith upon
his experiments and judgment.

Mr Townshend gives no account of the phreno-mesmerism, or of the
surgical operations performed without any evidence of pain during the
mesmeric states. We have already related one of the former exhibitions,
which, we think, requires no further comment. Viewed abstractedly, the
attempt to support by the assumed accuracy of one science, at best in
its infancy, and confessedly fallible, another still more so, is making
too large demands upon public credulity to require much counter
argument. With regard to the surgical cases, they stand on a very
different ground; three operations, among the most painful of those to
which man is ever subjected, are alleged to have been performed during
the mesmeric state--Madame Plantin, amputation of cancerous breast; and
James Wombwell and Mary Ann Lakin, amputation of the leg above the knee.
The case of Wombwell was canvassed at length at the Royal Medical and
Chirurgical Society of London; and in that and the other cases there
seems to have been no question raised as to the facts of the patients
having undergone the operation without the usual evidence of suffering.
In Wombwell's case the divided end of the sciatic nerve was purposely
(it appears to us very wantonly) touched with the forceps, but without
any appearance of sensation on the part of the patient. In all these
cases the medical men most opposed to mesmerism seem to have admitted
the fact, and to have rested their incredulity on the various cases
known to them, of parties having borne operations with suc