Esculapian Canutes,* rising and rising even now above their feet, although it may haply never reach their heads. The earth turns round,―e pur si muove—although the anti-Galileos of the day-the Inquisition of a Senatus Medicus-will have it, it is standing still. The smallest part of a grain of Hellebore will cure, although not learned Professors of their folly. They may refuse examination to Homœopathic students, as they have hitherto refused it to Homœopathic practice, but their own examination is going on the while. They may make their diplomas a license for untruth, as well as for any other breach of the Commandments, but they will not make the world believe (the world that will very soon come to understand that taking such degrees is not "taking honours ") that these will qualify for the Practice of Physic, whatever they may do for the Profession. Let them make what arbitrary laws they pleasethere is one they cannot overrule-and that is—public and intelligent opinion. This it is that legislates even to our legislators, and that now-a-days rules and regulates their Councils. And this will teach teachers, too, their duty to the taught that it is not to stunt and dwarf their mental growth by forbidding them any other kind of aliment than beliefs prepared and potted for their use-to arrest the development of their intellectual manhood by crushing it, as the Chinese lady does her foot, in the vice made for it by traditional opinion-to make them figure like stuffed birds in a Museum-or, instead of living, breathing men, mere fossil specimens of this or that formation. All this it will correct in the course of time. It will make them impose not Confessions of Faith, but conditions necessary to a faith worth having. And pronouncing in favour of Homœopathy itself, it will make that a matter soon of interest to Professors, that is not yet a matter of enquiry. To that public and intelligent opinion we may leave them. They have so discovered their lamentable weakness by the injury they would do us, but have done themselves, that though they have justified, they have hardly rendered necessary more than a passive attitude on our part. "Our strength is to sit still;" Aye! and study Hahnemann. Let us only be true

* If it be not libelling Canute so to call them, for centuries ago he unsaid in solemn jest, what, in the present day, they say in solemn earnest.

to ourselves and our high calling, and we may leave Halls and Colleges to do their worst. "In quiet and confidence shall be your strength." For me, I have such faith in the Omnipotence of Truth, and in the self-correction of the evils we most fear, that I can only say to my Alma Mater what poor Lear says to his unnatural daughter:-"Mend when thou canst!-Be better at thy leisure! I can be patient."

THE ODOMETER AND THE MAGNETOSCOPE.

It was early in the last year (1851) that Dr. Herbert Mayo sent out a supplementary chapter to the second edition of his book concerning the Truths contained in Popular Superstitions.* That new last chapter, or flying appendix, was circulated among the purchasers of this edition; but it also fell into many other hands. It purported to be no ordinary missive. Slight though it was, being no more than a flying sheet as has just been said, it brought no everyday message to the scientific world. Full of the sense of its importance, it dealt in details as careful and minute as Mrs. Quickly's parcel-gilt goblet and other items. It bore how the learned doctor, who is a valetudinary resident at Boppard on the Rhine, was taking lessons in the mathematical science or sciences at the hands of one Caspari, belonging to the Boppard gymnasium; and how the mathematician told the physician on the evening of the 31st December, 1850, the last night of the old year, that he had something to show him. Caspari then hung a gold ring by a thread, held between the finger and thumb of his right hand, over a silver teaspoon; and, sure enough, the ring began and continued to swing like a pendulum, until a maid-servant was summoned and told to take hold of the Italian's left hand-when the ring first came to a pause and then swung away as before, but in the opposite direction. In short, it swung from him when untouched, and even when touched by Mayo; but it swung across him so soon as a woman was brought to bear upon him!

* Letters on the Truths, &c. 1850.

Such was the Boppard mathematician's part in this famous investigation. He merely showed our countryman what he had himself been shewn a hundred times. In fact, the feat comes from mediæval times, when the black arts were both more in vogue and better understood than now. It is just one of many modifications of a familiar nursery experiment. Suspend a shilling inside a tumbler, and it will librate wider and wider till it strike against the glass, when it will proceed to strike the hour and then swing less and less widely till it fall to rest. Fasten the head of a poker in a loop about the middle of a yard of whipcord, grasp the ends of the cord in your hands, press your hands against your ears so as to make yourself deaf, bend so as to let the suspended poker hang within three or four inches of the fender, and it will not only play the pendulum but also strike the hour quite as faithfully as the shilling. The divining ring, however, has always been the favourite toy, and that with both old and young, doubtless on account of the added element of mystery in the effect of a woman; perhaps also owing to a sense of the humour of the thing. There is something at once weird and comic (a combination always dear to children, whether grown or ungrown) in the spectacle of a wedding-ring restlessly swaying to and from a man until some "not impossible she" lay her finger on him, coming to short and troubled rest, and then proceeding to sway as lustily as it did beforebut now across him. What a slyboots is the little Ariel of the ring!

But notwithstanding that Caspari (as being bound over to the cultivation of the mathematical sciences) knew no more of this exceeding mystery than his mother before him, nor aspired to know, the English doctor of Boppard was fired with the sacred rage of scientific curiosity at the sight of these balancings this way and that. He had been a professor of anatomy in London University College, had made discoveries in the brain, had studied all the natural sciences, had even explored some of the non-natural ones or ancient black arts, had wielded the divining rod with success and explained its action in a set form of words, quite as unintelligible but not nearly so mysterious as the geomantic twig itself; and, to sum up all, what was to hinder him finding

out the real nature of these marvellous librations! Nor was a mental initiative far to seek. The intellectual clew was in his hand already. Providence had thrown Von Reichenbach's experiments in his way, he had become convinced of the existence of a new imponderable or dynamide of the name of Odyle, he knew that the human body (especially at the fingertips) is one of the sources of the novel fluid, and therefore (!) that new and novel creature must be the cause of the movements in question. Odyle runs down the thread and does it. It is proved by experiment, for other light things (almost anything in fact) do as well as the ring, and almost anything does as well as the silver spoon; but Von Reichenbach has shewn that odyle emanates from, and reacts upon, literally every body in nature; and therefore (!) the antique divining-ring is nothing less than an odometer. So the old plaything becomes a noble implement in the hand of British science!

To speak seriously. Mayo made a number of experiments on this odometer of his; substituting chips of silver, lead, zinc, iron, copper, coal, bone, horn, dry wood, charcoal, cinder, glass, soap, sealing wax, shell-lac, brimstone, and even earthenware, for the more classical gold ring; and using gold, glass and many other kinds of matter instead of the original silver spoon. The suspended chips he called odometers; the underlying objects, od-subjects; and one might almost say it was no matter what kind of matter either the meter or the subject was made of, but Von Reichenbach's odyle streams out of all manner of substances under the sun and moon, as well as from these luminaries themselves. Assisted then by the unfortunate Caspari, Dr. Mayo suspended his chips over their od-subjects, nothing doubting. For two or three days, in good sooth, they would not move with anything like regularity; but scientific patience had its reward, and after a little training they swung about with the most satisfactory certainty. Nay, in ten days the invalid and his mathematical friend "succeded in disentangling the confused results which attended their first results." And the scientific leader of the investigation duly wrote down, for publi

* Researches on Magnetism, &c. in their relation to the Vital Force. By Karl, Baron Von Reichenbach. Translated by William Gregory, M.D. 1850.

cation to all England and the whole world, thirty experiments in which odometers moved directly to and fro, transversely, obliquely or half-and-half, and also circularly or round-andround, the attendant circumstances and conditions being also faithfully chronicled; whereupon the discovery of a physical proof of odyle rushes into print, and constitutes the subjectmatter of the supplementary chapter set forth and described in this historical notice.

Let the ingenuous and happy reader peruse a specimen of the proof. Here are eight choice experiments; the odometer being just an elongated little bit of shell-lac or the like, suspended by six or seven inches of thread, suspended from the forefinger of the operator.

"I. Odometer (we will suppose armed with shell-lac) 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 longitudinal oscillations being established, touch the forefinger which is engaged in 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 VOL. X, NO. XXXIX.-JANUARY, 1852.

H