it possible that persons endowed with a rare and
peculiar temperament can so operate on the
imagination, and, through the imagination, on
the senses of others, as to exceed even the
powers ascribed to the practitioners of
mesmerism and electro-biology, and give a certain
foundation of truth to the old tales of magic
and witchcraft. You imply that Margrave may
be a person thus gifted, and hence the influence
he unquestionably exercised over Lilian, and
over, perhaps, less innocent agents, charmed or
impelled by his will. And not discarding, as I
own I should have been originally induced to do,
the queries or suggestions adventured by Bacon
in his discursive speculations on Nature, to wit
'that there be many things, some of them
inanimate, that operate upon the spirits of men
by secret sympathy and antipathy,' and to which
Bacon gave the quaint name of 'imaginants;'
so even that wand, of which I have described to
you the magic-like effects, may have had
properties communicated to it by which it performs
the work of the magician, as mesmerists pretend
that some substance mesmerised by them can
act on the patient as sensibly as if it were the
mesmeriser himself. Do I state your suppositions
correctly?"

"Yes; always remembering that they are only
suppositions, and volunteered with the utmost
diffidence. But since, thus seated in the early
wilderness, we permit ourselves the indulgence
of child-like guess, may it not be possible, apart
from the doubtful question whether a man can
communicate to an inanimate material substance
a power to act upon the mind or imagination of
another man— may it not, I say, be possible
that such a substance may contain in itself such
a virtue or property potent over certain
constitutions, though not over all. For instance, it is
in my experience that the common hazel-wood will
strongly affect some nervous temperaments,
though wholly without effect on others. I
remember a young girl who, having taken up a hazel
stick freshly cut, could not relax her hold of it;
and when it was wrenched away from her by
force was irresistibly attracted towards it,
repossessed herself of it, and, after holding it a few
minutes, was cast into a kind of trance in which
she beheld phantasmal visions. Mentioning this
curious case, which I supposed unique, to a
learned brother of our profession, he told me that
he had known other instances of the effect of the
hazel upon nervous temperaments in persons of
both sexes. Possibly it was some such peculiar
property in the hazel that made it the wood
selected for the old divining rod. Again, we
know that the bay-tree or laurel was dedicated
to the oracular Pythian Apollo. Now wherever,
in the old world, we find that the learning of
the priests enabled them to exhibit exceptional
phenomena which imposed upon popular
credulity, there was a something or other which it
is worth a philosopher's while to explore. And,
accordingly, I always suspected that there was
in the laurel some property favourable to ecstatic
vision in highly impressionable temperaments.

My suspicion, a few years ago, was justified by
the experience of a German physician who had
under his care a cataleptic or ecstatic patient,
and who assured me that he found nothing in
this patient so stimulated the state of ' sleep-waking,'
or so disposed that state to indulge
in the hallucinations of prevision, as the berry
of the laurel.* Well, we do not know what
this wand that produced a seemingly magical
effect upon you was really composed of. You
did not notice the metal employed in the wire
which you say communicated a thrill to the
sensitive nerves in the palm of the hand, You
cannot tell how far it might have been the
vehicle of some fluid force in nature. Or still
more probably, whether the pores of your hand
insensibly imbibed, and communicated to the brain,
some of those powerful narcotics from which
the Boudhists and the Arabs make unguents
that induce visionary hallucinations, and in
which substances undetected in the hollow of
the wand, or the handle of the wand itself,
might be steeped.† One thing we do know,
viz. that amongst the ancients, and especially
in the East, the construction of wands for
magical purposes was no common-place
mechanical craft but a special and secret art
appropriated to men who cultivated with assiduity all
that was then known of natural science in order
to extract from it agencies that might appear
supernatural. Possibly, then, the rods or wands
of the East, and of which Scripture makes
mention, were framed upon some principles
of which we in our day are very naturally
ignorant, since we do not ransack science for
the same secrets. And thus in the selection or
preparation of the material employed, mainly
consisted, whatever may be referable to natural
philosophical causes, in the antique science of
Rhabdomancy, or divination and enchantment
by wands. The staff or wand of which you tell
me, was, you say, made of iron or steel and
tipped with crystal. Possibly iron and crystal
do really contain some properties not hitherto
scientifically analysed, and only, indeed, potential
over exceptional temperaments, which may
account for the fact that iron and crystal have
been favourites with all professed mystics,
ancient and modern. The Delphic Pythoness had
her iron tripod, Mesmer his iron bed; and
many persons, indisputably honest, cannot gaze
long upon a ball of crystal but what they begin
to see visions. I suspect that a philosophical
cause for such seemingly preternatural effects of
crystal and iron will be found in connexion with
the extreme impressionability to changes in
temperature which is the characteristic both of
crystal and iron. But if these materials do
contain certain powers over exceptional constitutions,
we do not arrive at a supernatural, but at
a natural phenomenon."

"Still," said I, "even granting that your

* I may add that Dr. Kerner instances the effect
of laurel-berries on the Seeress of Prevorst,
corresponding with that asserted by Julius Faber in the
text.

† See for these unguents the work of M. Maury
before quoted, La Magie et l'Astrologie, &c., p. 417.