TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 121 



of our race (and who can doubt that in some measure it must be so ?), we are bound 

 by motives of interest and duty to secm-e for all classes of the people that kind of 

 education which will lead to the development of the highest and most varied 

 mental power. And no one who has been observant of the recent progress of the 

 useful arts and its influence upon the moral, social, and political condition of 

 our population, can doubt that such education must include instruction in the 

 phenomena of external nature, including, more especially, the laws and condi- 

 tions of life and health ; and that it ought to be, at the same time, such as will 

 adapt the mind to the ready acquisition and j ust comprehension of varied knowledge. 

 It is obvious, too, that while this more immediatel)^ useful or beneficial effect on 

 the common mind may be produced by the dift'usion of natural Imowledge among the 

 people, biological science will share in the gain accruing to all branches of natural 

 science, by the greater favour which will be accorded to its cultivators, and the 

 increased freedom from'prejudice with which their statements are received and 

 considered by learned as well as by imscientific persons. 



I cannot conclude these observations without adverting to one aspect in which 

 it may be thought that the appreciation'of biological science has taken a retrogi-ade 

 rather than an advanced position. In this, I do not mean to refer to the special 

 cidtivators of biology in its scientific acceptation, but to the fact that there ap- 

 pears to have taken place of late a considerable increase in the number of persons 

 who believe, or who imagine that they believe, in the class of phenomena which 

 are now "called spiritual, but which have been known, since the exhibitions of 

 Mesmer, and, indeed, long before his time, vmder the most varied forms, as liable 

 to occur in persons of an imaginative turn of mind and peculiar nervous suscep- 

 tibility. It is to be regretted that a number of persons devote a large share of 

 their time to the practice (for it does not deserve the name of study or investiga- 

 tion) of the alleged phenomena, and that a few men of aclmowledged reputation 

 in some departments of science have lent their names, and surrendered their 

 judgment, to the countenance and attempted authentication of the delusive dreams 

 of the practitioners of spiritualism, and similar chimerical hj'potheses. The natu- 

 ral tendency to a belief in the marvellous is sufficient to explain the ready accept- 

 ance of such views by the ignorant ; and it is not improbable that a higher species of 

 similar credulity may frequently^act with^ persons of gi-eater cultivation, should 

 their scientific information and training have been of a partial kind. It must be 

 admitted, further, that extremelj' curious and rare and, to those who are not ac- 

 quainted with the nervous functions, apparently marvellous phenomena, present 

 themselves in peculiar states of the nervous system — some of which states may be 

 induced through the mind and may be made more and more liable to recur, and 

 to be greatly exaggerated by frequent repetition. But making the fullest allowance 

 for all these conditions, it is still surprising that persons, otherwise appearing 

 not to be irrational, should entertain a confirmed belief in the possibility of 

 phenomena, which, while they are at variance with the best established physical 

 laws, have never been brought under proof by the evidences of the senses, and ai'e 

 opposed to the dictates of sound judgment. It is so far satisfactory, in the interests 

 of true biological science, that no man of note can be named from the long list of 

 thoroughly well-informed anatomists and physiologists, who has not treated the 

 belief in the separate existence of powers of animal magnetism and spiritualism as 

 wild speculations, devoid of all foundation in the carefully tested obsei-vation of 

 facts. It has been the habit of the votaries of the systems to which I have refeiTed 

 to assert that scientific men have neglected or declined to investigate the pheno- 

 mena Avith attention and candour ; but nothing can be further from the truth than 

 this statement. Not to mention the admirable reports of the early French acade- 

 micians, giving the account of the negative result of an examination of the earlier 

 mesmeric phenomena by men in every way qualified to pronounce judgment on their 

 nature, I am aware that from time to time men of eminence, and fully competent, 

 by their knowledge of biological phenomena, and their skill and accm-acy in con- 

 ducting scientific investigation, have made the most patient and careful examina- 

 tion of the evidence placed before them by the professed believers and practitioners 

 of so-called mesmeric, magnetic, phrenomagnetie, electrobiological, and other like 

 phenomena; and the result has Been uniformly the same in all cases when they 



