JESCULAPIUS. 509 



lo ! "men and beasts and worms crawled on the same." The 

 swarm of lilipntians and dwarfs donned the dusty rags of the 

 dead, and the New World, rich in the splendors of a virgin 

 bride, full of unspeakable promises for the future, appeared 

 under the incubus of a fossil church and state, a fossil litera- 

 ture and philosophy, imported in decrepitude and decay from 

 the Old. For what can be wiser and safer than the laws of 

 England, deeper and more universal in its formulae than the 

 philosophy of Germany, or more exhaustive of the depths 

 of the infinite than the visions and dreams of Judea ? "The 

 new must have its radicals in the old." Certainly, erudite 

 savant ; but demonstrate the problem : if the old be good 

 wheat, whence, in the devil's name, come these infamous 

 crops of cheat ? Do you believe in univocal, or equivocal 

 generation ? 



The glimpse just taken at the Priessnitzian formula, or 

 water-cure, brings us into the presence of another imported 

 delusion, long since exploded in the land of its birth, dead, 

 buried, and almost forgotten there, that has found a fat 

 and nourishing asylum, a soil of strength and richness, 

 in this land of new inventions. Mesmer, of Suabia, col- 

 lected a multitude of the eccentric and anomalous mani- 

 festations of the life of the nervous system, recording all 

 obscure and mooted facts, all morbid and inexplicable 

 phenomena under the name, style, and title, of the " Science 

 of Animal Magnetism." This hallucination has given birth 

 to whole races of monsters in the New World, a family of 

 hydras which has grown more heads a thousandfold than 

 the fabled monster. 



In the first moment of contemplation this is incomprehen- 

 sible and overwhelming. But we need not be surprised with 

 anything from the country that has the honor of giving 

 birth to Miller, the man milliner of ascension robes ; to 

 Jo Smith, the true evangelical representative-man, the au- 

 thoritative exponent of the spirituality of the New World, 

 say the veritable Mohammed of the North American con- 

 tinent, whom it has murdered, and consequently glorified; 



43* 



