THE PROGRESS OF DISCOVERY AND SCIENCE. 173 



and magnetism. With the powerful battery of Mr. Groves, and the 

 guiding discernment of his own genius, he has arrested the ray of 

 light in its swift and noiseless passage, and made it obedient to his 

 very touch. Pushing on in these noble researches, he has arrived at 

 the beautiful conclusion that electricity and magnetism, with all their 

 manifold modes of manifestation, and heat and light with their endless 

 diversity of phenomena — whether gleaming in the dewy light of the 

 morning star, subduing the rugged landscape under the form of chaste 

 moonlight, or parching the herbage in a sultry summer's noon — are 

 all but diversified forms of one common agency, and that heat, light, 

 electricity and magnetism are only the several features of one uni- 

 versal law, and point for the origin of their phenomena to one simple 

 and central fact. 



Thus also while the age has brought to light myriads of truths un - 

 known before, to girdle the human race with a new circle of blessings, 

 it has rediscovered things which have slept for ages amid the dust of 

 perished empires, and which waited in ages past at the beckon of a 

 now-perished people. And long before the bell shall toll for the half 

 century which has just begun, the world will have unravelled the 

 secret of how far truth and fable have been mingled together in the 

 process of mesmerism, and how far the art or science of vital magnet" 

 ism is capable of useful application. Certain it is, that this power, 

 whatsoever it be, was known to the priests and teachers in centuries 

 gone by, and was used by them in mystic ceremonies for purposes of 

 terror and fraud, for the difi'usion of a false religion and the mainten- 

 ance of priestly power. But the new age shall use its wonders in a 

 nobler work, and setting its back on collusion and falsehood, seek to 

 apply this mysterious power in the alleviation of suff'eriug, the pro- 

 longation of life, and the unlocking of the secrets of the mind. 



Akin to the influence of a steadfast look or wave of the hand, which, 

 in those possessing mesmeric power, suffices to make a man a mere 

 machine obedient to the will of the operator, is that discovery of the 

 means of alleviating pain by a chemical agency, and which has 

 attained its highest development in the material called chloroform. 

 Emphatic teachings have we here of the value of researches and ex- 

 periments which when performed seemed to those whose minds were 

 circumscribed by present pence and shillings, to be but an amusement 

 for the childish or the insane. From those painful experiments of 

 Sir Humphrey Davy, by which he ascertained, almost at the cost of 



