OF THE FACULTY OF WONDER. i 99 



of trickery. One other thing I had on my lips to say the other night, 

 but I did not say it then, and I am not quite sure that I should do so 

 now ; therefore I can only indicate it very slightly. It is that this 

 conclusion as to the diseased nature of these manifestations, so far as 

 the mind of the recipient is concerned, was impressed upon me at a 

 very early period during the epidemic of manifestations of electro- 

 biology as it was called then in 1851 in Edinburgh. I had a dear 

 friend, since dead, and dead under circumstances that no injury to 

 him or any one else can be brought about by telling the story. He 

 was of a bad constitution originally. He had entered on the study of 

 medicine, and with such ardor had he taken up the branch of physi- 

 ology that I regarded him as likely to be one of the greatest physi- 

 ological inquirers of the day. I had not only respect for him as one 

 of my pupils, but I had for him a feeling of regard and love. He was 

 drawn into the vortex of Dr. Gregory's drawing-room exhibitions, and 

 his case appears in Dr. Gregory's book ; I knew it was disease ; I felt 

 it was disease. He was made to go out- of himself ; he was made to 

 wander here, there, and everywhere ; he was made to converse with 

 all the philosophers of ancient Greece with Aristotle, with Socrates, 

 and with Plato, and to tell what they said to him. He then took a 

 somewhat serious illness, and I became his medical attendant, and for 

 a time he was under my care alone. The persons who had obtained 

 this strange influence over him still kept coming about him, but at last 

 I had to forbid their presence. He got over his illness, and became 

 so far better, and they then again attempted to catch him, but failed. 

 Their power had gone, or almost gone, and only the poorer class of 

 manifestations could be produced, and ultimately none of them could 

 be produced, and for a considerable time after that he continued in 

 better health. But the essentially diseased character of the whole 

 thing was plain from this, that within a year or two he showed mani- 

 festations of actual insanity. The poor fellow excited my sympathy, 

 and I made an effort to save him. I took him to London, got him to 

 apply himself to histology, and tried to excite all his better and scien- 

 tific predilections. But the morbid tendency was too strong, and ulti- 

 mately he ended his days within the walls of an asylum. I do not 

 mean to say that Dr. Gregory made him mad. That would be wrong. 

 I do not think that was so, because he was better for a good while 

 after that, but I mean to say that the tendency of these things in a 

 constitution hereditarily predisposed to insanity is to insanity, or as 

 Shakespeare has put it in the mouth of King Lear, when conscious 

 that he is himself upon the giddy verge, " That way madness lies." 



