s and in all places represented by an image in the atmosphere,
that every existing object has a spectral intangible double which may
become visible, the Emperor would have sent his informant to Charenton
for a lunatic, just as Richelieu before his day sent that Norman martyr,
Salomon de Caux, to the Bicetre for announcing his immense triumph, the
idea of navigation by steam. Yet Daguerre's discovery amounts to nothing
more nor less than this.

And if for some clairvoyant eyes God has written each man's destiny over
his whole outward and visible form, if a man's body is the record of his
fate, why should not the hand in a manner epitomize the body?--since the
hand represents the deed of man, and by his deeds he is known.

Herein lies the theory of palmistry. Does not Society imitate God? At
the sight of a soldier we can predict that he will fight; of a lawyer,
that he will talk; of a shoemaker, that he shall make shoes or boots; of
a worker of the soil, that he shall dig the ground and dung it; and is
it a more wonderful thing that such an one with the "seer's" gift should
foretell the events of a man's life from his hand?

To take a striking example. Genius is so visible in a man that a great
artist cannot walk about the streets of Paris but the most ignorant
people are conscious of his passing. He is a sun, as it were, in the
mental world, shedding light that colors everything in its path. And who
does not know an idiot at once by an impression the exact opposite of
the sensation of the presence of genius? Most observers of human nature
in general, and Parisian nature in particular, can guess the profession
or calling of the man in the street.

The mysteries of the witches' Sabbath, so wonderfully painted in the
sixteenth century, are no mysteries for us. The Egyptian ancestors of
that mysterious people of Indian origin, the gypsies of the present day,
simply used to drug their clients with hashish, a practice that
fully accounts for broomstick rides and flights up the chimney, the
real-seeming visions, so to speak, of old crones transformed into young
damsels, the frantic dances, the exquisite music, and all the fantastic
tales of devil-worship.

So many proven facts have been first discovered by occult science, that
some day we shall have professors of occult science, as we already have
professors of chemistry and astronomy. It is even singular that here in
Paris, where we are founding chairs of Mantchu and Slave