is to say, if you
step a quarter of an inch before the sagacious nose of the public. Of
course, if any one should attempt to explain away a flourishing
superstition, he would encounter, not martyrdom, perhaps, any more, but
the persecution of opinion certainly, and the ban of society. But if he
ventures upon the same process, even with one that is already put down,
he is liable to be viewed and attacked as a credulous person, disposed
to revive forgotten rubbish; for he has unwittingly affronted public
opinion by asserting that to be worth examining, which society had
proclaimed an error. Doubly wo to him if his explanation contain some
startling novelty! But, courage! again,--

The bodies disinterred and found in the so-called vampyr state, were
then alive.

But how could they, you ask, be alive after an interment of days or
weeks? How is it possible they could lie without air, boxed up in a
manner which would certainly kill a strong and healthy person in a few
minutes or hours, and yet retain their vitality? I will not bring
forward as favourable cases in point, the instances of frogs and toads
that have been discovered in rocks, where they must have been encased
for years or centuries, alive: first, because, although they are true,
you might equally question these; secondly, because a human being cannot
compete in vitality with a cold-blooded reptile. I shall content myself
with falling back upon the evidence already adduced. The disinterred
bodies _proved_, by their appearance, some even by their behaviour, that
they were alive; and I shall retort upon you the question, how came you
not to know that bodies could live under such circumstances a
considerable length of time, and that many cases have transpired in
which, totally _apart from vampyrism_, bodies have been found turned
over in the coffin, through efforts made by them, when, after their
burial, they had unhappily recovered consciousness?

But what, then, was the pathological condition in which these persons
continued to exist, after they had ceased to appear alive?

It is just one of the profitable results of examining the superstition
before us, that the above question becomes explicitly propounded, and
its solution demanded of physiologists. Its solution cannot fail of
being full of interest, but it is yet, unluckily, a desideratum, or,
like the principle which gives motion to the divining rod, as yet only
indicated and partially outlined.

What is w