666 MESMERISM. 



little ones from head to foot before putting them to bed, and the 

 Oriental habit of uniting friction with the bath, is mesmeric. It is 

 a great oversight in them not to adduce the habit of brute mothers 

 to lick their little ones, as licking is friction with the tongue : 

 but then to be sure brutes lick themselves also. It must however 

 be an oversight not to adduce the habit of expecting our grooms 

 to rub down our horses thoroughly night and morning. The 

 verses of Martial referred to as implying mesmeric practice, are 

 fully as applicable to grooms and horses : 



" Percurrit agili corpus arte tractatrix 

 Manumque doctam spergit omnibus membris." (iii. 82.) 



Ignorant Mr. Mahomet and the rest of the shampooers ! ignorant 

 women who get your living as rubbers to the diseased ! you ima- 

 gine not that you are all animal magnetisers. The mesmeric pro- 

 cess of rubbing horses, universal in civilized nations, would have 

 been as good an example as that of a family in Dauphine, " who 

 have been in the habit of magnetising, from father to son, for cen- 

 turies," and whose " treatment consists in conducting the great toe 

 along the principal ramifications of the nerves;" or as that of the 

 great toe of King Pyrrhus. It was irreverent to adduce a merely 

 royal toe, when virtue is known to go out of the toes of his holiness 

 the Pope, whose foot is therefore devoutly kissed by the faithful. 

 The ancient medical employment of friction is mesmeric : and so 

 must be all similar mechanical means ; and among the rest the 

 douche, which is liquid friction and percussion. I do not see why 

 percussion, on the good effects of which treatises have been 

 written, is not as mesmeric as friction. Mere touch does wonders, 

 not by imagination, but mesmerically. A boy at Salamanca is 

 mentioned who cured numberless persons merely by touching 

 them with his hand. Many monks did the same. They forget to 

 mention at the same time that an inanimate hand has great power 

 in this way. It might be thought to have lost its mesmerism, but 

 the mesmeric fluid is probably retained by the ligature around the 

 neck, for the hand of a dead man just fresh from the gallows is to 

 this day stroked over tumours to remove them. If any thing is 

 mesmeric and not 'mechanical, this must be; as it is quite sufficient 

 to draw the hand once across the swelling. Then again the 

 efficacy of the royal touch has been known from the time of 



