ON "ANIMAL MAGNE1ISM." 



131 



tall Tribune tower." He declares that when he 

 " lifts his gaze to the very uppermost pinnacles 

 of the mount of established truth, he finds stand- 

 ing there, not Haeckel nor Spencer, but Hehu- 

 holtz," and other gentlemen, and they " are all 

 on their knees;" though it must be as hard for 

 a professor to stand On his knees on a pinnacle 

 as to go off the stage kneeling, in the way pro- 

 posed in the Critic. Then this country is made 

 the butt of his eloquence : 



" Am I to stand here in Boston, and be told 

 that there is no authority in philosophy beyond 

 the Thames ? Is the outlook of this cultured au- 

 dience, in heaven's name, to be limited by the 



North Sea ( The English we revere ; but Prof. 

 Gray says that there is something in their tem- 

 perament that leads to materialism. England, 

 green England ! Sour, sad, stout shies, with azure 

 tender as heaven, omnipresent, but not often visi- 

 ble behind the clouds ; sour, sad, stout people, with 

 azure tender as heaven, and omnipresent, but not 

 often visible behind the vapors. Such is Eng- 

 land, such the English." 



"Boston, since 1852, has been wringing her 

 hands in secret," Mr. Cook says ; and she may 

 well wring them in public, while the ghost of 

 Charles Baudelaire rejoices, if this fustian is the 

 end of her " culture." — Saturday Revieio. 



ON "ANIMAL MAGNETISM." 



A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TERROR. 

 By Prof. W. Preter, of Jena University. 



WITCHCRAFT has always had an extraor- 

 dinary attraction for the undisciplined in- 

 telligence. Even in our own day fabulous sto- 

 ries play an important part beyond the limits of 

 the nursery, and witchcraft and palmistry are 

 by no means believed in only by peasants ; and, 

 when we hear the great public remarking on the 

 tricks of a conjurer, we can easily perceive a tinge 

 of superstition even in the more intelligent class 

 of unprofessional persons. Whether it be spirit- 

 ism or animal magnetism, or undisguised belief 

 in ghosts, there is often left, after school-training 

 and life-experience have done their best to form 

 sound habits of thought, a residual obscure no- 

 tion, in conflict with a man's better knowledge, 

 that the ordering of things is somehow uncanny, 

 and that all is not regulated by law. Even men 

 without religion, and in whom the capability of 

 belief in the dogmas inculcated into them in 

 childhood has completely died out, skeptics, nay, 

 even eminent scholars, occasionally fall victims 

 to the epidemic of credulity which has prevailed 

 for some years past. 



" But there must be something in it," many 

 persons will say. " Why is it," they ask, " that 

 physiology — the only science that is competent 

 to investigate this thing — takes no notice of it ? 

 We do not refer to the familiar performances of 

 the prestidigitateur, or the frauds and trickeries 



1 Translated from the German by J. Fitzgerald, 

 A.M. 



of sundry magnetizers and somnambules; these 

 things, like the cabala and astrology, like the 

 performances of wizards and rhabdomants, we 

 dismiss as unworthy of scientific investigation : 

 but there are stiil left a great number of phenom- 

 ena that have no connection with the foregoing, 

 and which we can refer to no settled category of 

 facts. Certain undoubted wonderful cures, the 

 phenomena of second-sight, the still mysterious 

 table-tipping ; above all, the altogether unques- 

 tionable fact that, by the use of certain manipula- 

 tions, one man is able to produce in a number of 

 other persons a condition externally resembling 

 that of sleep, namely,' somnambulism — these are 

 all physiological problems. In this last-named 

 state of somnambulism, where there is no sleep 

 properly so called, nor yet wakefulness, the mag- 

 netized subjects or clairvoyants undergo an es- 

 sential modification of their intellectual faculties. 

 Often their senses become more acute : for in- 

 stance, their eyes being blindfolded, they will hear 

 the motion of a hand at fifty feet distance, or by 

 the sense of smell they will detect the presence of 

 a given person. What is to be thought of such 

 things as these ? When a healthy man, by simply 

 fixing his gaze for a few minutes on one object, 

 can produce sound sleep and analepsy, just as 

 the Indian fakirs have done for centuries, and as 

 was done again by Dr. Baird in 1841, at Man- 

 chester, it becomes evident that the phenomena 

 of this kind which have been actually observed 



