But this fact requires a succinct relation of some events of his medical career, which will give, moreover, a new interest to this history.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, science was as profoundly divided by the appearance of Mesmer, as was art by that of Gluck. After having re-discovered magnetism, Mesmer came to France; whither, from time immemorial, inventions have hastened to obtain the legitimation of their discoveries. France, thanks to her clear language, is, in a manner, the trumpet of the world.

"If Homœopathy arrive at Paris, it is saved," said Hannemann, lately.

"Go to France," said M. de Metternich to Gall, "and if they laugh at your bumps there, you will be illustrious."

Mesmer had then adepts and antagonists, as ardent as the Piccinists against the Gluckists. Learned France was stirred; a great opening was presented. Before the decree, the Faculty of Medicine had proscribed, in mass, the pretended charlatanism of Mesmer, his trough, his conducting-wires, and his theories. But, it must be said, this German, unfortunately, compromised his magnificent discovery by enormous pecuniary pretensions. Mesmer succumbed to the uncertainty of facts; to the ignorance of the part played in nature by the imponderable fluids, then unobserved, and by his inaptitude to appreciate the threefold faces of his science.*

Magnetism has more than one application, and, in the hands of Mesmer, it was what the principle is to its effects. But, if the finder did lack genius, it is sad for human reason and for France to have to confess that a science contemporaneous with societies, equally cultivated by Egypt and by Chaldea, by Greece and by India, experienced in Paris, in the eighteenth century, the fate which truth had met in the person of Galileo, in the sixteenth; and that magnetism was there repulsed at once by religionists and materialist philosophers, equally alarmed.

Magnetism, the favorite science of Jesus, and one of the divine powers remitted to the apostles, did not seem to have been any more expected by the Church than by the disciples of Rousseau

The medical, by its action on the organism; the ultramundane, by the intercourse which it permits with spirits; the utilitarian, by its extension of the senses upon our own plane of life: or else, the atmospheric, or static, voltaic, or galvanic, and the animal forms of magnetic electricity.-TR.

and Voltaire, of Locke and Condillac. Neither the encyclopedia nor the clergy could accommodate itself to this old human power, which seemed so new. The miracles of the convulsionaries, stifled by the Church and by the indifference of the learned, notwithstanding the precious writings of Counsellor Carré of Montgerou, were a first summons to experiments on human fluids, susceptible of annulling by interior forces the pains caused by external agents. But it would have been necessary to recognize the existence of fluids, intangible, invisible, imponderable-three negations in which the science of that day could see only a definition of vacuum. In modern philosophy, no vacuum exists. Six feet of void, and the world crumbles. Especially for the materialists the world is full: all is connected, enchained, and works by machinery. "The world," says Diderot, "as an effect of chance, is more explicable than God. The multiplicity of causes, and the immeasurable number of throws which chance supposes, explain the creation. Given the Æneid, and all the characters necessary to its composition, if you leave me time and space, by dint of throwing up the letters, I will obtain the combination Æneid." Those unfortunates who deified everything rather than admit God, also drew back before that infinite divisibility of matter which is implied by the nature of imponderable forces. Locke and Condillac then retarded, for fifty years, the immense progress now being made by the natural sciences under that thought of unity due to the great Geoffroy Saint Hilaire. Some upright men, without a system, convinced by facts conscientiously studied, persevered in the doctrines of Mesmer, which recognized in Man the existence of a penetrating influence prevailing between man and man, set at work by the will, curative by the abundance of the fluid, and the play of which constitutes a duel between two wills-between an evil to be cured, and the will to cure it.

The phenomena of somnambulism, hardly suspected by Mesmer, were due to MM. de Puysegur and Deleuze; but the Revolution set a pause to these discoveries, and gave the upper hand to the learned and to the jesters. Among the small number of believers were some physicians. These were persecuted by their confrères as long as they lived. The respectable corps of physicians of Paris displayed, against the mesmerians, the acerbity of religious wars, and was as cruel in its hatred against them as it was possible to be, in this age of Voltairian toleration.

The orthodox doctors refused to consult with doctors who held to the mesmeric heresy. In 1820, they were still the objects of tacit proscription. The misfortunes, the storms of the Revolution did not extinguish this scientific hatred. There are but priests, magistrates, and physicians, to hate thus. The robe is always terrible. But should not ideas be more implacable than things? Doctor Bouvard, a friend of Minoret, adhered to the new faith, and persevered until death in the science to which he had sacrificed the repose of his life; for he was one of the black sheep of the Faculty of Paris. Minoret, one of the most valiant upholders of the Encyclopedia, the most formidable adversaries of Deslou, the prevost of Mesmer, and whose pen had a great power in this quarrel, not only broke all connection with his old companion-he did worse, he persecuted him. His conduct towards Bouvard was the only cause of repentance that might disturb the calm of his declining years.

Since Doctor Minoret's retreat to Nemours, the science of the imponderable fluids, the only name that befits magnetism-so strictly linked by the nature of its phenomena with light and electricity was making immense progress, notwithstanding the continual railleries of Parisian science. Phrenology and Physiognomy, twin sciences of Gall and of Lavater, and which are to each other as the cause to the effect,* demonstrated to the eyes of more than one physiologist the traces of the unseizable fluid, basis of the phenomena of the human will, and whence result the passions, the habits, the forms of the face, and those of the cranium. Finally, the magnetic facts, the miracles of somnambulism, those of divination and of ecstacy, which permit us to penetrate into the spiritual world, were accumulating.

The strange story of the apparitions of the Farmer Martin, so well authenticated, and the interview of this peasant with Louis XVIII. ; the knowledge of Swedenborg's relations with the dead, so firmly established in Germany; the narratives of Walter Scott on the effects of the second sight; the exercise of prodigious faculties by certain fortune tellers, who blend in one science cheiromancy, cartomancy, and the horoscope; the facts of catalepsy and the properties of the diaphragm revealed by certain morbid affections these phenomena, at least curious, all emanating from

* Because not only the play, but the formation of the features depends upon the action of the cerebral organs.-TR.

the same source, sapped many doubts, and led the most indifferent to the ground of experiment.

Minoret was ignorant of this intellectual movement, so great in northern Europe, still so feeble in France, where there occurred, nevertheless, facts qualified as marvelous by superficial observers, and which fall like stones to the bottom of the sea, amid the whirl of Parisian events.

In the beginning of this year, the repose of the anti-mesmerian was disturbed by the following letter:

"My old Comrade :

"All friendship, even lost, has rights which can not well be set aside. I know that you still live, and I remember less our enmity than our fine days at the shanty of St. Julien le Pauvre. As I draw near the time of leaving this world, I am anxious to prove to you that magnetism is going to constitute one of the most important of the sciences; if, indeed, Science is not to be one. I can overthrow your incredulity, by positive proofs. Perhaps I shall owe to your curiosity the pleasure of once more clasping your hand, as we other's before Mesmer's time.

Ever yours,

clasped each BOUVARD.

Stung like a lion by a gadfly, the anti-mesmerian bounded to Paris, and left his card on old Bouvard, who lived Rue Férou, near St. Sulpice. Bouvard answered by a card, at his hotel, writing, "To-morrow, at nine, Rue St. Honoré, in front of l'Assumption." Minoret, young again, did not sleep; he called on the old physicians of his acquaintance, and asked them if the world were upset; if medicine had a school, and whether the four faculties survived. The physicians assured him that the old spirit of resistance continued; only that instead of persecuting, the Académie de Médecine and Académie des Sciences puffed with laughter, in ranging the magnetic facts among the surprises of Comus, of Compte, of Bosco, in juggleries, prestidigitation, and what is called the Amusements of Physics. This did not prevent old Minoret from keeping his appointment with Bouvard. After fortyfour years of enmity, the two antagonists met under a carriageway of the street St. Honoré. The French are too continually diverted to hate each other long and deeply. In Paris, especially, facts extend space too much, and make life too vast in politics, literature, and science, for men not to find there countries to conquer in which their pretensions can reign at ease. Hatred requires so much force always armed, that it becomes necessary to hate in companies, when we want to hate long. Memory is a faculty

which, in its higher degrees, belongs only to corporations. Thus, after forty-four years, Robespierre and Danton embraced. Each of the two doctors, however, reserved his hand. Bouvard first said to Minoret: "You are looking admirably well."

en.

'Yes, not amiss; and you?" asked Minoret, the ice once brok

"I, as you see.

"Does magnetism hinder folks from dying?" asked Minoret, in a tone of levity, but without bitterness.

"No: but it has nearly hindered me from living."

"You are not rich, then?"

"Bah!"

"Well, I am rich, myself!"

"I do not want your fortune, but your conviction. Come, then."

"Oh! you obstinate fellow," exclaimed Minoret.

The mesmerian drew the skeptic along into a staircase, rather dark, and, with due precautions, up to the fourth story.

[To be continued.]

THE CATHOLIC CHAPTER.

SELF-SURRENDER.

THE heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters. It is not sufficient for a kite's dinner; yet the whole world is not sufficient for it. Quoted from Hugo de Anima.

Every excessive desire either blinds us to some duty, or makes us deaf to its call.

A great step is gained, when a child has learned that there is no necessary connection between liking a thing and doing it.

Hare.

Higher considerations have taught us the God Wish is not the true God.

Carlyle.

The poorest education that teaches self-control is better than the best that neglects it.

Sterling.

Self-will is so ardent and active, that it will break a world to pieces to make a stool to sit on.

Cecil.