eeding fishes on genuine hosts. His is the reverse of
the system of the mediaeval witches who chose a vile beast dedicated to
the Devil to submit the body of the Saviour to the processes of
digestion. How real is the pretended power which the deicide chemists
are alleged to wield? What faith can we put in the tales of evoked larvae
killing a designated person to order with corrosive oil and blood virus?
None, unless one is extremely credulous, and even a bit mad.

"And yet, come to think of it, we find today, unexplained and surviving
under other names, the mysteries which were so long reckoned the product
of mediaeval imagination and superstition. At the charity hospital Dr.
Louis transfers maladies from one hypnotized person to another. Wherein
is that less miraculous than evocation of demons, than spells cast by
magicians or pastors? A larva, a flying spirit, is not, indeed, more
extraordinary than a microbe coming from afar and poisoning one without
one's knowledge, and the atmosphere can certainly convey spirits as well
as bacilli. Certainly the ether carries, untransformed, emanations,
effluences, electricity, for instance, or the fluids of a magnet which
sends to a distant subject an order to traverse all Paris to rejoin it.
Science has no call to contest these phenomena. On the other hand, Dr.
Brown-Sequard rejuvenates infirm old men and revitalizes the impotent
with distillations from the parts of rabbits and cavies. Were not the
elixirs of life and the love philtres which the witches sold to the
senile and impotent composed of similar or analogous substances? Human
semen entered almost always, in the Middle Ages, into the compounding of
these mixtures. Now, hasn't Dr. Brown-Sequard, after repeated
experiments, recently demonstrated the virtues of semen taken from one
man and instilled into another?

"Finally, the apparitions, doppelgaenger, bilocations--to speak thus of
the spirits--that terrified antiquity, have not ceased to manifest
themselves. It would be difficult to prove that the experiments carried
on for three years by Dr. Crookes in the presence of witnesses were
cheats. If he has been able to photograph visible and tangible spectres,
we must recognize the veracity of the mediaeval thaumaturges. Incredible,
of course--and wasn't hypnotism, possession of one soul by another which
could dedicate it to crime--incredible only ten years ago?

"We are groping in shadow, that is sure. But Des Hermies hit t