, dropped suddenly from a height of twelve or
fifteen feet? Boxers, it is true, in the excited state in which they
enter the ring, receive, unmoved, from their opponents blows which would
prostrate a man not prepared, by hard training, for the trial. But even
such blows, in the end, sometimes prove mortal; and what should we say
of substituting for the human fist a sharp-pointed rapier, and expecting
that the tension of the nervous system would render impenetrable the
skin of the combatant? Finally, it is to be admitted, that flexible
weapons, especially if loaded, as the cat-o'-nine-tails, still used in
some countries as an instrument of military punishment, occasionally is,
with hard, angular substances, are among the most severe that can be
employed to inflict punishment or destroy life. But what would even the
poor condemned soldier, shrinking from that terrible instrument of
torture which modern civilization has not yet been shamed into
discarding, think of the proposal to substitute for it the andiron with
which Montgeron, at the twenty-fifth blow, broke an opening through a
stone wall,--the executioner-drummer being commanded to deal, with his
utmost strength, one hundred and sixty blows in succession, with that
ponderous bar, (a bar with rough edges, no cylindrical rod,) not on the
back of the culprit, but on his unprotected breast?

No wonder that De Gasparin, with all his aversion for the supernatural,
and all his disinclination to admit anything which he cannot explain,
after quoting from Calmeil the above explanation, feels its
insufficiency, and seeks another. These are his words:--

"How does it happen, that, after being struck with the justice of these
observations, one still retains a sort of intellectual uneasiness, a
certain suspicion of the disproportion between the explanation and the
phenomena it seeks to explain? How does it happen, that, under the
influence of such an impression, many suffer themselves to be seduced
into an admission of diabolical or miraculous agency? It happens,
because Dr. Calmeil, faithful to the countersign of all learned bodies
in England and France, refuses to admit fluidic action, or to make a
single step in advance of the ordinary theory of nervous excitement. Now
it is in vain to talk of contractions, of spasms, of turgescence; all
this evidently fails to reach the case of the St.-Medard _succors_. To
reach it we need the intervention of a peculiar force,--of a fluid whi