768 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tion asserts that he is now seventy-two years of age, but that God 

 had assured him, through the mouth of the Virgin, that his eyes 

 shall see the salvation of France, and that he shall not die until 

 these predictions have been fulfilled. That such crass supersti- 

 tion should be made the means of political propagandism in the 

 last decade of the nineteenth century is certainly a strange phe- 

 nomenon. 



Another book indicating the rank growth of superstition in 

 recent times is Dr. Theobald Bischofberger's Die Verwaltung des 

 Exorcistats nach Massgabe des romischen Benediktionale, of which 

 a new edition, revised and enlarged, was published by Roth at 

 Stuttgart in 1893. The author evidently prides himself upon his 

 powers as an exorcist, and relates with great unction and assur- 

 ance his experiences in casting out devils by a hocus-pocus worthy 

 of an American medicine-man or an African conjurer. In the 

 section of his manual entitled Recognition of Demoniac Dis- 

 eases he states that the signs of diabolical possession are quite 

 conspicuous, but not altogether infallible, such as understanding 

 foreign tongues without having learned them, and revealing the 

 place where objects have been hidden, a peculiar faculty now 

 known as mind-reading. Some persons thus affected are subject 

 to fits of fainting ; others shake and shiver as though they had 

 the ague ; others break out into profuse perspiration, or are seized 

 with an irrepressible tendency to yawn, often developing into 

 chronic oscitation. Sometimes the symptoms are imperceptible 

 to the observer, as when the patient complains of internal heat, 

 or suffers from constriction of the head, confusion of ideas, roar- 

 ing in the ears, and similar troubles. Dr. Bischofberger admits 

 that disorders produced by demons are difficult to distinguish 

 from those due to natural causes. Thus the paroxysms of an epi- 

 leptic who is diabolically possessed do not differ from those of an 

 epileptic who has ansemia of the brain or other cerebral affection. 

 The sensations of the aura epileptica and the convulsions that fol- 

 low them are the same, whatever may be their origin. There is, 

 however, one sure means of determining whether a disease is 

 demoniac or not namely, the use of the pr&ceptum probativum 

 or exorcismus probation-is, by which the demon or demons, if 

 there are several of them, are commanded in the name of Jesus to 

 give a clear and manifest sign of their presence, and, if they have 

 any power over this creature of God in his sickness, to agitate 

 him and do the same things in the presence of the exorcist that 

 they have been wont to do in his absence : Prsecipio tibi daemon, 

 vel vobis da^monibus, si plures sitis, in nomine Jesu, ut mihi ali- 

 quod signum evidens et manif estum faciatis vestrise prsesentise, si 

 aliquam potestatem habeatis in hanc creaturem Dei in hac ejus 

 in eegrotatione, agitando earn vel coram me aliquid ex iis faciendo, 



