the hands of the world, and doubt will be at
once removed; if, as they say, their science is not of equal exactitude,
they must bide their time and not complain.

Magnetism and electricity, moreover, often cited by Mr Townshend, and
undoubtedly the most surprising additions to human knowledge within the
historical period, though abnormal, are not contradictory to
experience--they were an entirely new series of facts added to our
previous store--they did not destroy or lessen the force of any
previously received truths. Not so mesmerism, and therefore the more
stringent should be, and is, the proof required.

Come we now to the second class of arguments adopted in favour of
mesmerism, and by the same persons (Mr Townshend, for instance) as
support the first. Mr Townshend says, (p. 29,) "to the mesmeriser the
facts of mesmerism are no miracles;" and yet he avers that mesmerism can
make the blind see and the deaf hear. (Pp. xxxii., and 178.) We cannot
very clearly see his notion of a miracle. Passing over this, however,
and taking him to assert what the first branch of his argument requires
to be asserted, that there is no miracle, or that there is nothing but
the contradiction of a necessary truth, such as that three angles of a
triangle are equal to two right angles, which _may_ not fall within some
natural law of which we have not all the data--we cannot see why, in the
second half of his book, he so sedulously endeavours to prove that
mesmerism is consistent with experience, and may be supported upon
similar grounds, and accounted for by similar theories, to those by
which the agency of the imponderable forces is established and accounted
for. After using every argument in his power to show the fallibility of
experience, and the reasons why we should not disbelieve mesmerism
because contradictory to it, which contradiction he admits in terms, the
author writes a chapter, the title of which is, "Conformity of Mesmerism
with General Experience."--(P. 155.) As instances of these reverse modes
of viewing the subject, we quote the following passages--the one taken
from the commencement of the book, where the first line of argument is
adopted; the other from the latter portion, where the second is.

"Thus, then, till the initial step towards a comprehension of
mesmerism be taken anew, there is no hope that it will ever be
understood or appreciated. Why unavailingly seek to reduce it to a
formula of whic