i62 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



these "sensitives" found their hands so powerfully attracted by mag- 

 nets or crystals as to be irresistibly drawn toward them ; and thus 

 tliat if tlie attracting object were forcibly drawn away, not only the 

 hand, but the whole body of the "sensitive" was dragged after it. 

 Another set of facts was adduced to prove the special relation of 

 odyle to terrestrial magnetism namely, that many " sensitives " 

 cannot sleep in beds which lie across the magnetic meridian ; a posi- 

 tion at right angles to it being to some quite intolerable. 



Von Reichenbach's doctrine came before the British public under 

 tlie authority of the late Dr. Gregory, the Professor of Chemistry in 

 the University of Edinburgh ; who went so far as to affirm that, " by 

 a laborious and beautiful investigation, Reichenbach had demon- 

 strated the existence of a force, influence, or imponderable fluid 

 whatever name be given to it which is distinct from all the known 

 forces, influences, or imponderable fluids, such as heat, light, elec- 

 tricity, magnetism, and from the attractions, such as gravitation, or 

 chemical attraction." It at once became apparent, however, to expe- 

 rienced j^hysicians conversant with the proteiform manifestations of 

 that excitable, nervous temperament, of which I have already had to 

 speak, that all these sensations were of the kind which the physiolo- 

 gist terms "subjective;" the state of the sensorium on which they 

 immediately depend being the resultant, not of physical impressions 

 made by external agencies upon the organs of sense, but of cerebral 

 changes connected with the ideas with which the minds of the " sensi- 

 tives " had come to be " possessed." The very fact that no manifes- 

 tation of the supposed force could be obtained except through a con- 

 scious human organism should have been quite sufficient to suggest 

 to any philosophic investigator that he had to do not with a new 

 physical force, but with a peculiar phase of physical action, by no 

 means unfamiliar to those who had previously studied the influence 

 of the mind upon the body. And the fact which Von Reichenbach 

 himself was honest enough to admit that when a magnet was poised 

 in a delicate balance, and the hand of a " sensitive " was placed above 

 or beneath it, the magnet was never drawn toward the hand ought 

 to have convinced him that the force which attracted the "sensi- 

 tive's " hand to the magnet has nothing in common with physical 

 attractions, whose action is invariably reciprocal; but that it was the 

 product of her own conviction that she must thus approximate it. So 

 "possessed" was he, however, by his pseudo-scientific conception, 

 that the true significance of this fact entirely escaped him; and 

 althougli he considered that he had taken adequate precautions to 

 exclude the conveyance of any suggestion of which his " sensitives " 

 should be conscious, he never tried the one test which would have 

 been the experhnentum crucis in regard to all the supposed influences 

 of magnets that of using electro-magnets, which could be " made " 

 and " unmade " by completing or breaking the electric circuit, with- 



