s. France, thanks to her lucid language, is in some sense the
clarion of the world.

"If homoeopathy gets to Paris it is saved," said Hahnemann, recently.

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

Mesmer had disciples and antagonists as ardent for and against his
theories as the Piccinists and the Gluckists for theirs. Scientific
France was stirred to its center; a solemn conclave was opened. 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. Magnetism, the favorite science of Jesus Christ and
one of the divine powers which he gave to his disciples, was no better
apprehended by the Church than by the disciples of Jean-Jacques,
Voltaire, Locke, and Condillac. The Encyclopedists and the clergy were
equally averse to the old human power which they took to be new. The
miracles of the convulsionaries, suppressed by the Church and smothered
by the indifference of scientific men (in spite of the precious writings
of the Councilor, Carre de Montgeron) were the first summons to make
experiments with those human fluids which give power to employ certain
inward forces to neutralize the sufferings caused by outward agents. But
to do this it was necessary to admit the existence of fluids intangible,
invisible, imponderable, three negative terms in which the science of
that day chose to see a definition of the void. In modern philosophy
there is no void. Ten feet of