། point, so that it will be better to proceed at once to the criticism of his doctrine of odyle. competent to the commoving of the excep- Carefully remembering then that the heats, colds, and luminosities of this whole investigation do not correspond with any real external phenomena of temperature and light; yet allowing that the perception of them as quasi-sensations or sensuous illusions is initiated by some occult action on the exceptional nerve, it remains to be considered what the agent of that action is in itself. It is resident in everything that is material; it is more potent in matter that is more active, in crystals, in light, in chemical mixtures, in magnets, in the living body; it is peculiarly energetic in mighty magnets, and in a kind of mighty men. Wherever there is more than ordinary atomic activity, or wherever the sum of that activity in a single form is made to drive in one direction by polarity, as in the magnet and the crystal, there this obscure action upon the exceptional nerve, this cœnæsthesia, as Feuchterleben the great medical psychologist would have called it, is more than ordinarily made manifest. Of its cœnæsthetic effects we know absolutely nothing, except in and by means of the sensuous illusions it gives rise to in some roundabout manner, of which also we know nothing. Now all nature is quick with motion, all nature throbs and thrills, all nature is phenomenal. Suns blaze and rotate, planets rotate and revolve, atoms never rest. The coldest stone is as full of movements, actions, and reactions as the milky way. How much more intense the interior phenomena of a regular crystal with its pointing axis and poles, an energetic magnet, a plate of metal with the sun flashing on it, the chemi- Reichenbach, however, has devised and cal backet, an ever-unfolding tree, the body promulged quite another doctrine, which of a breathing man! Every footfall is pro- seems to comply with only the last of these pagated through the universe. Did it des- rules. He refers the cœnæsthetic effects cend on the snows of Siberia, it would pen- under discussion to the agency of a new imetrate to Peru in a trice, and pass on for ponderable or dynamide. This new fluid or ever. It would institute motions in every force is distinguished from caloric, electricity, nerve in Christendom. Suppose that instead magnetism, and their congeners, by the name of a footstep it were an earthquake, is it not of odyle. Apart from hypercriticism of the very easily conceivable that the exceptional notions commonly entertained concerning the nerve should be obscurely sensitive of the nature of the so-called imponderables or dyshock, not so as to recognize it for an earth-namides in general, and allowing the usefulquake or a shock, but so as to fashion forth for itself a sensuous illusion pointing to the north-east, a flash of light or a glow of heat? In a precisely similar manner do we think that the ordinary atomic energies, which are common to all animal magnets, are quite * Hidden, secret, latent, or dark sensation. ness of such language as corresponds with these notions in the meantime, we can only say that we do not see the necessity or convenience of creating this new sort of matter or material power; and those who have followed our strictures on the facts of the case with their approval will assuredly say the same, We acknowledge neither the thing | nor the name. The former is non inventum and unnecessary; and the latter is as odd as it is ill compounded. They are both of them intellectual illusions in our opinion, struck out of the investigator by his observ-lished on incomparably more outward and ations:-et præterea nihil. events, the inherence of bipolarity in a force so dimly and remotely hinted by experiment as this, even supposing it to be nothing less than a new cosmical power, must be estab The author indeed endeavors to substantiate his odyle by investing it with a show of popularity, and setting it forth in all the algebraical and Arabian dignity of plus and minus, and dressing it out in the point-lace of positive and negative,-thesis, midpoint, and antithesis. This part of his researches appears to be a signal failure. Heat and cold are not polar opposites; the latter is the negative of the former in a very different sense from that in which the chloroid pole of a galvanic battery is negative to the zincoid one. They are not anode and cathode, they are not positive and negative, two yet one, opposites not differents, in the physical sense of these terms. Neither are light and darkness; still less are red and blue. Yet the only indication to be found in our author's experiments, that his (invented) odyle is bipolar in its manifestations, is the fact that heat and cold, red and blue, are produced as quasi-sensations in the exceptional nerve by the actions respectively of the poles of a magnet, the poles of a crystal, sun and planet, right and left of the human body, oxygenoid and potassoid bodies, and so forth. That the opposite poles of a magnet (and so forth throughout the list) should produce different cœnæsthetic effects is what might be expected It tallies with all experience. But these effects, coolness and warmth, do not stand in polar opposition to one another after all! Moreover, the experimentalist should have remembered that his sole reagent, namely the cerebro-spinal axis of a sensitive, is confessedly and notoriously a bipolar instrument. It is therefore our distinct opinion that the very superficial semblance of bipolarity, observable in the conæsthetic effects of crystals and other animal magnets, are derived partly from the polar relations of the agents, and partly from the manifestly bipolar constitution of the nervous systems of the reagents, from Reichel and Nowotny up to Endlicher and Kotschy, to say nothing of the duality of the cerebrospinal axis of the observer himself. At all * Men of science are sometimes, if not generally, but indifferent hands at the making of words. Chloroform has been dubbed an anesthetic agent! An anesthetic is an insensible; but chloroform is neither sensible nor insensible; it only renders its inhaler insensible. positive grounds than the quasi-sensational reports of exceptional women and men. Such is a candid criticism of this singular piece of work from the point-of-view of a positive, that is to say, an inductive methodology; and we trust it has been expressed with good nature and respect. In case any reader, going along with the experimentalist in all his judgments, should think some of our phraseology is touched with the spirit of levity and some of it too caustic, we beg to repeat the assurance of a profound regard for the accomplishments, the ability, and the courage of the inventor of odyle. It is confessedly a miserable thing to think that a laborious and self-denying man shall spend years of toil in working out a difficult subject, only to be criticised by people sitting at their ease in their studies; and we should feel our present task to have been ungracious in its very nature, and even somewhat insolent in its performance, if we did not heartily desire, and now strongly express the wish, that everybody who has perused this commentary should also read the book commented on. Nor is it possible for the student of positive science to forget that, although an experimental subject may be open enough to critical objection in its earlier stages of development, another day's work or a single new experiment on the part of the explorer may cover the handless critic with confusion of face. Talk is nothing to work, and speculation is less than nothing to fact. The only thing that becomes men like our present experimenter is to tread right forward; coolly, firmly, slowly, and surely. In some propitious hour he may discover a purely physical reagent upon odyle; and thereby not only silence the conscientious critic, who will rejoice to hold his peace; but also bring to open shame that curse of science, the man that "sits in the chair of the scorner." Nor must the reader whose bad passions may perhaps have been gratified by the body, if not by the spirit of this critique, conclude that little or nothing remains in the book after such large deductions as have just been made. Very far from that. Supposing the author and his disciples ready to grant that the odylic lights are as spectral as the odylic heats and colds, that the existence of odyle is the most questionable thesis in all the literature of experimental science, and in fine, that every one of our objections is founded, there would still remain a massive body of new matter. So extensive, orderly and authentic a narrative of sensuous illusions is an invaluable contribution to the science of medical psychology. But that is not all; for this investigator has established the proposition, that the whole of nature is reactive on the nervous system of man, on a breadth of basis which cannot be shaken; there being no matter, considering the thing as a discovery of fact, whether that influence be exerted through the medium of a new dynamide, or by the propagations of the well-known cosmical powers of matter. The idea of this proposition is as old as the doctrine of the macrocosm and the microcosm; it entered into the conceptions of astrology; it was a favorite with the Rosicrucians; it was a grand point with Paracelcus; it began to shape itself into a distinct hypothesis within the mind of the elder Van Helmont; it at length derived a local habitation and a name from Mesmer; and the affirmation of that unfortunate physician has now received immovable confirmation from the careful observations of Baron von Reichenbach. This will, of course, be understood to be said only of the bare and simple proposition stated above; because, as for the hypothetical entities entitled animal magnetism or odyle, whether singular like caloric or dual like electricity, we reject it and its attendant speculations altogether:-until such not impossible evidence of its individual activity be discovered and brought forward, as no experimentalist shall be able to withstand. It has just been remarked, in the second last paragraph, that the discovery of some purely physical reagent upon the (so-called) animal-magnetic or odylic fluid would settle the question for ever. Such an instrument, or rather something professing to be such an odylometrical apparatus, has actually been found out and offered to the world of science since the present year began; and it therefore behoves us to examine its claims with impartiality and rigor. Dr. Herbert Mayo was once well known in this country as an anatomist. Certain observations on the brain gained him a distinct reputation; and he lectured in University College, London, for some time, with acceptation. Of late years, however, unfortunately for advancing science, this distinguished physician has been invalided at Boppart, on the Rhine. Completely crippled by his malady, he presides over an establishment for the water-cure, and beguiles the day with literary and scientific pursuits. Among other things, he has written and published, from his sad retreat, a series of letters on the truths contained in popular superstitions. These interesting and openminded epistles have lately reached a second edition. It appears that the ingenuous doctor has become acquainted, in the course of his multifarious reading, with the experimental researches and the inferences of our friend the Baron von Reichenbach; and, indeed, accorded them his cordial and unreserved belief and consent. So lately as the very last evening of 1850, he was introduced by a mathematical proficient, of the name of Caspari, to the mystery of that antique geomantic toy, the divining ring. After an hour or two's tuition in the higher mathemathics, for this English invalid is too accomplished to be ashamed of being a scholar, the pupil and his teacher entered into a desultory chat about the divining rod and Von Reichenbach's book on odyle. The upshot of their gossip was as follows. Caspari had something to tell as well as Mayo; and, what was still better, he had something to show. He wanted nothing but a piece of silver, a gold ring, and a thread of silk for his experiment. Having tied the ring to one end of the thread, he held the other in his hand in such a manner that the ring hung right over a silver spoon upon the table. The ring was not allowed to touch the spoon it was suspended half an inch above it. It soon shaped its first vagabond movements into regular oscillations, passing from and towards the body of the geomancer; and it was at once evident to the valetudinary Englishman that this longitu dinal vibration must be akin to the motion of the still more venerable divining rod itself. But this was far from being the ter minus of his inferential career; for a maid was summoned to the thaumaturgical chamber, and she was desired to place her hand in that of Caspari, which was free. No sooner had she done so, than the oscillations of the hanging ring became transverse; they went at right angles to their former direction; they passed from left to right across the person of the mathematician, instead of to and from him. In other words, to quote the too rapid and resistless conclusion of the old anatomist, "an od-current had been established between the two experimenters, and the apparent influence of the two metals on each other had been modified." Without stopping to question this sudden connection of the swingings of his gold ring | disturbance produced by the maid's laying with the Reichenbachian talisman called her hand in Caspari's free one, should any odyle, Dr. Mayo plunged into the investiga- or all of them produce mechanical motions tion of this new department of odylic science. of either one sort or another. There are He multiplied experiments, making as many only two directions of mechanical force that as thirty supposed to be worthy of publica- we know of, attraction and repulsion. Did tion. For gold he substituted silver, lead, the ring draw towards the spoon, it would zinc, iron, copper, coal, bone, horn, dry stand stock still; all the stiller, in fact, for wood, charcoal, cinder, glass, soap, wax, this supposed odylic attraction, superinduced sealing-wax, shell-lac, brimstone, and earth- upon the common downdraught of gravitaenware; and he called a lengthy little chip tion. Did they repel one another, their of any of these substances, when hanging mutual repulsion would be in right and not by a silk thread, an odometer, thereby ad- in oblique antagonism to the attraction of vancing a considerable way in his novel re- gravity, and continued repose is the only searches ! In place of the silver spoon, he conceivable resolution of two such forces. tried gold, glass, and other kinds of matter; Besides, Reichenbach has not adduced a and these he denominated od-subjects,-an single effect of mechanical movement as proeccentric enough procedure in inductive in- duced by his supposed new dynamiide: and quiry, but carrying the mind another step he certainly never dreamed of such an ecforward in the investigation of this foregone centric development of the idea of motive conclusion. For two or three days the odo- force, as shot up within the mind of the meters would not move over the od-subjects English resident at Boppart, under the sight with anything like lawful regularity, but of the mathematical teacher from the gymperseverance gained its legitimate reward. nasium and his ring; and that in less than They began and continued to vibrate, and a night, like the bovista giganteum in a loose, sometimes to rotate, with the most exem- light, and damp soil, under the spectral plary certainty. In ten days, Caspari and touch of the moon! his disciple "succeeded in disentangling the confused results which attended their first experiments." The literary doctor wrote down thirty observations of how odometers moved longitudinally, transversely, obliquely, round and round, according to their own inherent natures, to those of the od-subjects over which they were held, to the relative positions of these to those, to the relation of the operator with a person of the opposite sex, and so forth over several otherwise valuable sheets of writing-paper. Zealous of good works, he swiftly embodied his discoveries in a posthumous letter, to be printed for Blackwood and Sons, and, circulated among the possessors of his book. It is worth while to consider this seminal experiment a little for it is the germ from which the aforesaid thirtyfold structure has developed itself, after the morphological fashion in botany, that of self-repetition; in the present instance, however, the clumsy and uninventive self-repetition of the cactus. The first thing that puzzles the simpleminded reader is the difficulty of understanding how, according to the instantaneous perception of Dr. Mayo, the residence of odyle in the ring and spoon, even in the state of polar opposition, or the passage of odyle from the experimenter down the thread, or its leaping the half-inch gulf between the gold ring and the silver spoon, or the odylic The phantasmagorical nature of his initiative idea, however, did not diminish the ardor with which the friend of odyle pursued his experiments; it rather acted as a stimulant to his enthusiasm. And it cannot be denied that experiments may be good and sufficient, even when the hypothesis from which they are studied is as incongruous as a dyspeptic's dream. A gold ring, with a plain stone, was his first odometer, but he eventually had recourse to an inch of shellac, broader below and lancet-shaped throughout; hanging the thread over the first joint of one of his forefingers for the most part. Then here are the results : I. Odometer (we will suppose armed with shellac), held over three sovereigns heaped loosely together to form the od-subject; the odometer suspended from the forefinger of a person of either sex. Result-Longitudinal oscillations. II. Let the experimenter, continuing experiment I., take, with his or her unengaged hand, the hand of a person of the opposite sex. Result-Transverse oscillations of the odometer. III. Then, the experiment being continued, let a person of the sex of the experimenter, take and hold the unengaged hand of the second party. Result-Longitudinal oscillations of the odometer. IV. Repeat experiment I., and, the longi tudinal oscillations being established, touch, the forefinger which is engaged with the odometer, with the forefinger of your other hand. Result-The oscillations become transverse. V. Repeat experiment I., and, the longitudinal oscillations being established, bring the thumb of the same hand into contact with the finger implicated in the odometer. Result-The oscillations become transverse. VI. Then, continuing experiment V., let a person of the same sex take, and hold your unengaged hand. Result-The oscillations become again longitudinal. VII. Experiment I. being repeated, take and hold in your disengaged hand, two or three sovereigns. Result-The oscillations become transverse. VIII. Continuing experiment VII., let a person of the same sex take, and hold your hand which holds the sovereigns. Result -The oscillations become longitudinal. And so on through other twenty-two experiments; the last three being made with a glass odometer. He can vouch for being able to reproduce, unfailingly, the recorded results of only the first twenty-seven experiments however. He had been in doubt as to the genuineness of the whole hypothek of them in fact; they were so contradictory and capricious for some days. But the interest of these experiments is now very considerable, he says. They seem to him to contribute a mass of objective and physical evidence in favor of the subjective results of Reichenbach's experiments, and add something to the cumulative demonstration that there exists some such universal force as odyle. And such a universal force," exclaims this disciple, more generous than his master, "what other can we deem it to be than the long vilipended influence of Mesmer, rendered bright, and transparent, and palatable, by passing through the filter of science ?" a quality, we repeated Caspari and Mayo's It is quite possible, beforehand, that these thirty experiments may be as genuine in their essence, as they are undoubtedly true in the report of them; and, before criticising them, we shall relate other three experiments of our own. I. Being men of firm nerves, and perfectly self-possessed in so far as the body is concerned, having never suffered from any neuropathic disease in our lives; always having failed in getting hypnotized or mesmerized, though ever so willing; not to be swayed by the suggestion of circumstances or of other folk; but strongly mesmeric, if there be such II. We summoned two ladies to witness the experiment repeated. No sooner had the ring come to rest than it began to move again, and that no longer vaguely. It swung to and from us along the line of the spoon; but as soon as one of the fair testators laid hold on our unoccupied hand it stopped, only however to vibrate transversely. The thing was repeated with the same results; it oscillated longitudinally when we were sole and singular; transversely when either of the ladies gave us her hand. We bade them observe how fixedly we held our uplifted hand, and they observed it. But, to tell the reader the truth, we produced these motions of the ring by means of infinitely trifling and imperceptible movements of our hand; and without any difficulty we could suffer the tricksy pendulum to fall to rest whenever we chose. This is certainly not the manner in which Dr. Herbert Mayo's librations, longitudinal and transverse, were brought about; but this |