had neutralized the gravitating force of a material body, had elevated
me hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet in the atmosphere, and by some
mysterious charm was attracting me toward a distant bourne. Years
before, whilst a medical student at the University of Louisiana, the
professor of _materia medica_ had opened his course of lectures with an
inquiry into the origin and essence of gravitation, and I had listened
respectfully, but at that time doubtingly, to the theory he propounded.
He stated that it was not unphilosophical to believe that the time would
arrive when the gravitating power of dense bodies would be overcome, and
balloons constructed to navigate the air with the same unerring
certainty that ships traversed the ocean.

He declared that gravitation itself was not a _cause_ but an _effect_;
that it might be produced by the rotation of the earth upon its axis, or
by some undiscovered current of electricity, or by some recondite and
hitherto undetected agent or force in nature. Magnetism he thought a
species of electricity, and subsequent investigations have convinced me
that _sympathy_ or _animal magnetism_ was akin to the same parent power.
By means of this latter agent I had seen the human body rendered so
light that two persons could raise it with a single finger properly
applied. More than this, I had but recently witnessed at Castillo, dead
matter clothed with life and motion, and elevated several feet into the
air without the aid of any human agency. This age I knew well to be an
age of wonders. Nature was yielding up her secrets on every hand; the
boundary between the natural and the spiritual had been broken down; new
worlds were flashing upon the eyes of the followers of Galileo almost
nightly from the ocean depths of space. Incalculable treasures had been
discovered in the most distant ends of the earth, and I, unlettered hind
that I was, did not presume to limit the power of the great Creator, and
because an act seemed impossible to my narrow vision, and within my
limited experience, to cry aloud, _imposture_, or to mutter sneeringly,
_insanity_.

Before proceeding farther with the thread of this narrative, the
attention of the reader is solicited to the careful perusal of the
following extracts from Stephens's _Travels in Central America, Chiapas
and Yucatan_, published at New York in 1841.

But the Padre told us more; something that increased our
excitement to the highest pitch. On the