x877*J Notices of Books. 395 
feel, see, or smell anything they were led to believe they would 
feel, see, or smell.” His evidence for this is, that Mr. Braid 
could make his subjects do so, and that Dr. Carpenter had seen 
him do it. One of them, for instance, — an intellectual and able 
Manchester gentleman, — “could be brought to see flames issuing 
from the poles of a magnet of any form or colour that Mr. Braid 
chose to name.” All this belongs to the mere rudiments of 
mesmerism and is known to every operator. Two things, how- 
ever, are essential — the patient or sensitive must be, or have 
been, mesmerised, or electro-biologised as it is commonly called, 
and the suggestion must be actually made. Given these two 
conditions and no doubt twenty persons may be made to declare 
that they see green flames issuing from the operator’s mouth ; 
but no single case has been adduced of persons in ordinary 
health, not subject to any operation of mesmerism, &c., being 
all caused to see this or any other thing in agreement, by being 
merely brought into a dark room and asked to describe 
accurately what they saw. Yet this is what Von Reichenbach 
did, and much more. For, in order to confirm the evidence of 
the “sensitives” first experimented on, he invited a large number 
of his friends and other persons in Vienna to come to his dark 
room, and the result was that about sixty persons of various ages 
and conditions saw and described exaCtly the same phenomena. 
Among these were a number of literary, official, and scientific 
men and their families, persons of a status fully equal to that of 
Dr. Carpenter and the Fellows of the Royal Society — such as 
Dr. Nied, a physician ; Professor Endlicher, director of the 
Imperial Botanic Garden ; Chevalier Hubert von Rainer, bar- 
rister ; Mr. Karl Schuh, physicist ; Dr. Ragsky, Professor of 
Chemistry ; Mr. Franz Kollar and Dr. Diesing, Curators in the 
Imperial Natural History Museum, and many others. There 
was also an artist, Mr. Gustav Anschutz, who could see the 
flames, and drew them in their various forms and combinations . 
Does Dr. Carpenter really ask his readers to believe that his ex - 
planation applies to these gentlemen ? That they all quietly 
submitted to be told what they were to see, submissively said 
they saw it, and allowed the fa Cl to be published at the time, with- 
out a word of protest on their part from that day to this ? But a 
little examination of the reports of their evidence shows that they 
did not follow each other like a flock of sheep, but that each had an 
individuality of perceptive power, some seeing one kind of flame 
better than another; while the variety of combinations of magnets 
submitted to them, rendered anything like suggestion as to what 
they were to see quite impossible, unless it were a deliberate 
and wilful imposture on the part of Baron von Reichenbach. 
But again, Dr. Carpenter objeCfs to the want of tests, and 
especially his pet test of using an eleClro-magnet, and not letting 
the patients know whether the eleCtric circuit which “ makes ” 
and “ unmakes, ” the magnet was complete or broken. How 
