308 Another View of Levitation. (July, 
During the time of those epidemics called Witchcraft, in 
the Middle Ages, the trial by water was grounded on the 
assumption that a person demoniacally possessed could not 
sink; and the test of scales and weights was used, prompted 
by the same popular conviction. The Irish seem to have 
confined their belief of the capacity of the human body to 
receive some influence counteractive of gravitation to the 
case of lunatics, especially when the phrensy was induced 
by fear. Thus, in the battle of Moyrath, Sweeny, the young 
king of Dalaraidh, who has provoked the curse of an angry 
epeiesiene! is vipired on the battle-field with an excess of 
terror which deprives him at once of his senses and his 
bodily weight, and he rises like a leaf or a waif in the air 
over the heads and helmets of those around him, and so 
flits rather than—in the figurative sense—flies from the field. 
The battle of Moyrath is said to have been fought in 637 A.D., 
and certainly the belief may well be accepted as having 
been—even at that early period—settled in the popular 
mind ; for here, A.D. 718, in the ‘‘ Chronicle of the Monks of 
Clonmacnoise,” we find the record of a furious battle between 
the northern and southern Hy-Niall, at the Hill of Allen, 
in Kildare, where—together with a great number of kings 
and chiefs, whose names are given—there perished novem 
volatiles, 1.¢., gealta, 1.¢e., nine volatiles or flying phrenetics, 
who, in the words of the old translator, ‘flyed in the ayre 
as if they were winged fowle.’ As usual, the visitation is 
consequent on the curse of a religious person,—in this case 
a leper, whose cow had been seized by some of the com- 
batants.”” Dr. Ferguson continues, ‘‘ One is naturally led to 
ask, Can there be such a body of tradition without such 
a foundation in fact; and, if so, is it a contradiction or 
negation of the Newtonian law that we are to admit as a 
solution ?” . 
We may easily answer that, even if we found men 
floating, Newtonian gravitation would not be interfered 
with. Balloons, even when rising, still gravitate, and mag- 
nets—even rising from the sround by the attraction of 
another magnet—are not out of the influence of gravitation. 
It is not at all known whether mental excitement affects 
weight, but even if it does it can only be to a small extent, 
and “the physical reasoning is quite against it; at the same 
time, neither the reasoning nor the experiments have been 
made with such care as men would give had they the 
slightest hope of gaining any knowledge. The connection 
of the body with magnetism and electricity is a most obscure 
subject: there evidently i is much to learn; there are move- 
