668 MESMERISM. 



from the eye. Every schoolboy remembers the passage in 

 Virgil 



" Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos." d 



The word envy comes from invidio, and this from in and video. 

 The Arabs dread the evil eye above all other mischiefs, and, if a 

 stranger expresses admiration of any object belonging to them, 

 they avert the calamity by passing over the object ajinger wetted 

 with saliva. Who is ignorant that the fierce look of man disarms 

 the most ferocious brutes of their courage : that Pliny recom- 

 mends breathing upon the forehead as a means of cure 6 ; and that 

 when a child complains the nurse often tells it she will blow away 

 the pain. A dyspeptic friend of mine assured me that, on con- 

 sulting a celebrated physician at an inland watering place, the 

 doctor put his finger in mystic silence upon his forehead before 

 feeling his pulse. Had it not been a little too late in the day, 

 I have no doubt he would carry on such tricks like the notorious 

 Dr. Streper, an Irish gentleman named Valentine Greatrakes, 

 and a gardener named Leverett, who all, in the middle of the 

 seventeenth century, cured thousands by stroking with the hand. 

 Boyle and Cudworth both put themselves under the care of Great- 

 rakes ; and the Lord Bishop of Derry declared that he himself 

 had seen " dimness cleared and deafness cured, " pain " drawn 

 out at some extreme part, " " grievous sores of many months date, 

 in a few days healed, obstructions and stoppages removed, and 

 cancerous knots in the breast dissolved," by the Irishman. The 

 gardener used to say that so much virtue went out of him, that 

 he was more exhausted by touching thirty or forty people than by 

 digging eight roods of ground. By means of the mesmeric fluid, 

 some believers explain why a person cannot tickle himself; why, 

 proverbially, when a friend is near, we think of him (" talk of the 

 devil, &c.") ; and why, at the moment of death, distant friends 

 have been said to see or hear the dying who happen to be think- 

 ing intensely of them so as mesmerically to influence them ! f 



d Eclog. 30. e Hist. Nat. xxviii. 6. 



f A short and luminous account and defence of mesmerism will be found 

 in Dr. Georget's Physiologic du Systeme [Nerveux y t. i. from p. 268. to 301. 

 1821. Drs. Hufeland, Treviranus, Sprengel, Reil, Autenrieth, Kieser, Carus, 

 &c. have believed in it. 



For a good and entertaining history of the mesmeric phenomena as they ap- 



