

THEORY OF KISSING. 309 



the sensitive young lady, Mademoiselle Reichel. His ghost- 

 light emanated from a dead body very far gone indeed, a 

 mere skeleton, that had been deposited there at a time be- 

 yond the memory of the oldest inhabitant; but Mademoiselle's 

 corpse -candles burnt over very recent corpses. 



The baron expresses some sort of regret at the necessity 

 which compelled him, so to speak, acting in the interests of 

 science, to apply the clairvoyant talents of Mademoiselle in 

 such an unpleasant occupation as that of wandering through 

 graveyards and cemeteries at dusk, in quest of what in future 

 must only, for courtesy's sake, be called ' ghosts.' He ex- 

 plains, however, that the occupation was not so dreadful as 

 it sounds, or looks on paper; for the reason that his young 

 lady had been accustomed to see those ghost-lights, those 

 flickering corpse-candles, from the days of her babyhood. 

 The baron, not to leave his vindication of Mesmer and Per- 

 kins, and all antecedent mesmerists and animal magnetisers, 

 half accomplished, explains collaterally how it happened that 

 patients sitting round a magnetic tub, as it has been called, 

 each grasping such a conductor in his or her hand, should 

 derive profit from the treatment. Such had been a practice 

 of Mesmer ; and the agency liberated had by him been re- 

 ferred to magnetism. Now Reichenbach showed, to his own 

 satisfaction, that the results were altogether incompatible with 

 the assumption of a magnetic origin; but that the tub in 

 question, or rather the varied contents put into it, established 



Pa chemical action, from which in consequence came the new 

 force, the subject of his investigation. 

 In this short narrative I have endeavoured to give a fair 

 and reasoned abstract of Reichenbach's labours in this walk 

 of investigation. Here and there a certain element of the 

 ridiculous will have made itself manifest ; and readers may 

 be excused for assuming that the writer has gone out of his 

 way for the sake of a joke, in order to make a statement 

 look ridiculous in the deductions of which he does not believe. 



