372 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



Rosy Cross. They followed Paracelsus in attributing oc- 

 cult and miraculous powers to the magnet, and established 

 what is now known as the "faith cure;" or in other 

 words, they worked upon the imagination of invalids, 

 highly nervous persons and credulous people generally. 

 They became known later as "magnetizers," and attracted 

 to their ranks hundreds of the alchemists, whose calling 

 was rapidly becoming disreputable, seeing that all their 

 efforts to transmute the base metals into gold had invari- 

 ably failed, and that they were now manifesting an incli- 

 nation to swindle. 



The magnetizers pretended to transplant diseases by 

 means of the magnet and to cure them by applications of 

 the magnet to the body the latter, a delusion dating from 

 the period of the Samothracian rings. That was "min- 

 eral" magnetism. "Animal magnetism," so called, de- 

 veloped from this, and did not necessarily involve the in- 

 terference of any actual lodestone or iron magnet at all. 

 As I have stated, the magnetizers derived many of their 

 peculiar doctrines from Paracelsus; but their principal de- 

 ception, the magnetic cure of wounds, rested upon the 

 imaginary properties of an unguent originally invented by 

 one Corrichterus, who was physician to Maximilian II. 

 The peculiarity of this compound, which contained, among 

 other gruesome ingredients, "the mossy periwig of the 

 skull of a man destroyed by violent death in the increase 

 of the Moon," was that no magnet was ever put into it; 

 not even the powdered lodestone which the ancients and 

 the mediaeval leeches mixed in plasters to draw out iron 

 from the body. Subsequently, it was made of less horrible 

 materials, and eventually became nothing but iron sul- 

 phate in powder. 



Among the leading Rosicrucians was John Baptist Van 

 Helmont, a Flemish physician and chemist, still honestly 

 renowned as the first to recognize the existence of differ- 

 ent kinds of air and to use the term "gas," and as the re 

 puted discoverer of carbonic acid. He had been a cl< 



