MESMERISM. 693 



bulisra, and even teach the art. f Cardanus professed to be able 

 to place himself in ecstatic insensibility. $ St. Austin tells of a 

 priest, named Restitutus, who could become insensible and lie like 

 a dead man whenever he pleased, insensible to blows, punctures, 

 burning, though if persons spoke loudly he heard something 

 like distant sounds. h We have a modern account of a similar 

 nature: A man in India, "is said by long practice, to have 

 acquired the art of holding his breath by shutting his mouth and 

 stopping the interior opening of the nostrils with his tongue ; he 

 also abstains from solid food for some days previous to his in- 

 terment ; so that he may not be inconvenienced by the contents 

 of his stomach, while put up in his narrow grave ; and, moreover, 

 he is sewn up in a bag of cloth, and the cell is lined with ma- 

 sonry and floored with cloth, that the white ants and other 

 insects may not easily be able to molest him. The place in 

 which he was buried at Jaisulmer is a small building about twelve 

 feet by eight, built of stone ; arid in the floor was a hole about 

 three feet long, two and a half feet wide, and the same depth, 

 or perhaps a yard deep, in which he was placed in a sitting 

 posture, sewed up in his shroud, with his feet turned inwards 

 towards the stomach, and his hands also pointed inwards towards 

 the chest. Two heavy slabs of stone, five or six feet long, and 

 broad enough to cover the mouth of the grave, so that he could 



Testament, and all the miracles relating to the animal frame, were only so much 

 mesmerism, and that Christ was but an extraordinary mesmeriser. A celebrated 

 living mesmerist asserted this in a public lecture at Montpellier, and the people 

 soon afterwards took up stones to stone him and endeavoured to drive him out 

 of their city. Mr. Colquhoun himself quotes at great length a fierce tirade 

 against the Bible, calculated, I should think, to produce great irreverence of 

 the book. 



Mr. Colquhoun would have rendered real service to mesmerism, if, instead 

 of compiling so much rubbish, and displaying such ignorance and credulity, 

 with a dogmatism and coarseness (vol. i. p. 136. ; vol. ii. p. 162. sqq.) which 

 have prevented me from being at all delicate with respect to him, he had col- 

 lected unquestionable facts only and gone to work experimentally, like a phi- 

 losopher, and communicated his results to the public. 



* Ceremonies et Coutumes rSligieuses, t. vi. p. 188. 



8 " Quoties volo, extra sensum quasi in ecstasin transeo." Dererum varietate, 

 ], viii. c. 43. 



h De civitate Dei : all quoted in Isis revelata, vol. i. p. 146. sq. 



