ngly
difficult to speculate prospectively upon the consequences of the
discovery, but one thing may be positively maintained--that the
announcement of the discovery six months ago would have had material
influence in regard to the settlement of California.

In Europe, as yet, the most noticeable results have been a rise of two
hundred per cent. in the price of lead, and nearly twenty-five per cent.
that of silver.

MESMERIC REVELATION

WHATEVER doubt may still envelop the _rationale_ of mesmerism,
its startling _facts_ are now almost universally admitted. Of these
latter, those who doubt, are your mere doubters by profession--an
unprofitable and disreputable tribe. There can be no more absolute waste
of time than the attempt to _prove_, at the present day, that man, by
mere exercise of will, can so impress his fellow, as to cast him into an
abnormal condition, of which the phenomena resemble very closely those
of _death_, or at least resemble them more nearly than they do the
phenomena of any other normal condition within our cognizance; that,
while in this state, the person so impressed employs only with effort,
and then feebly, the external organs of sense, yet perceives, with
keenly refined perception, and through channels supposed unknown,
matters beyond the scope of the physical organs; that, moreover, his
intellectual faculties are wonderfully exalted and invigorated; that his
sympathies with the person so impressing him are profound; and, finally,
that his susceptibility to the impression increases with its frequency,
while, in the same proportion, the peculiar phenomena elicited are more
extended and more _pronounced_.

I say that these--which are the laws of mesmerism in its
general features--it would be supererogation to demonstrate; nor shall I
inflict upon my readers so needless a demonstration; to-day. My purpose
at present is a very different one indeed. I am impelled, even in
the teeth of a world of prejudice, to detail without comment the very
remarkable substance of a colloquy, occurring between a sleep-waker and
myself.

I had been long in the habit of mesmerizing the person in
question, (Mr. Vankirk,) and the usual acute susceptibility and
exaltation of the mesmeric perception had supervened. For many months he
had been laboring under confirmed phthisis, the more distressing effects
of which had been relieved by my manipulations; and on the night of
Wednesday, the fifteenth instant, I