istant, whose pen had great weight in the controversy, quarreled with
his old friend, and not only that, but he persecuted him. His conduct
to Bouvard must have caused him the only remorse which troubled the
serenity of his declining years. Since his retirement to Nemours the
science of imponderable fluids (the only name suitable for magnetism,
which, by the nature of its phenomena, is closely allied to light and
electricity) had made immense progress, in spite of the ridicule of
Parisian scientists. Phrenology and physiognomy, the departments of Gall
and Lavater (which are in fact twins, for one is to the other as cause
is to effect), proved to the minds of more than one physiologist the
existence of an intangible fluid which is the basis of the phenomena
of the human will, and from which result passions, habits, the shape of
faces and of skulls. Magnetic facts, the miracles of somnambulism, those
of divination and ecstasy, which open a way to the spiritual world, were
fast accumulating. The strange tale of the apparitions of the farmer
Martin, so clearly proved, and his interview with Louis XVIII.; a
knowledge of the intercourse of Swedenborg with the departed, carefully
investigated in Germany; the tales of Walter Scott on the effects of
"second sight"; the extraordinary faculties of some fortune-tellers, who
practice as a single science chiromancy, cartomancy, and the horoscope;
the facts of catalepsy, and those of the action of certain morbid
affections on the properties of the diaphragm,--all such phenomena,
curious, to say the least, each emanating from the same source, were now
undermining many scepticisms and leading even the most indifferent minds
to the plane of experiments. Minoret, buried in Nemours, was ignorant of
this movement of minds, strong in the north of Europe but still weak
in France where, however, many facts called marvelous by superficial
observers, were happening, but falling, alas! like stones to the bottom
of the sea, in the vortex of Parisian excitements.

At the bottom of the present year the doctor's tranquillity was shaken
by the following letter:--

My old comrade,--All friendship, even if lost, as rights which it is
difficult to set aside. I know that you are still living, and I
remember far less our enmity than our happy days in that old hovel of
Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre.

At a time when I expect to soon leave the world I have it on my heart to
prove to you that magnetism is about t