Before judgment was rendered, the medical faculty proscribed, in a body, Mesmer's so-called charlatanism, his tub, his conducting wires, and his theory.

But let us at once admit that the German, unfortunately, compromised his splendid discovery by enormous pecuniary claims.

Mesmer was defeated by the doubtfulness of facts, by universal ignorance of the part played in nature by imponderable fluids then unobserved, and by his own inability to study on all sides a science possessing a triple front.

Magnetism has many applications; in Mesmer's hands it was, in its relation to the future, merely what cause is to effect.

But, if the discoverer lacked genius, it is a sad thing both for France and for human reason to have to say that a science contemporaneous with civilization, cultivated by Egypt and Chaldea, by Greece and India, met in Paris in the eighteenth century the fate that Truth in the person of Galileo found in the sixteenth; and that magnetism was rejected and cast out by the combined attacks of science and religion, alarmed for their own positions.