g without trial that which
belongs to the Marvellous,--'and whatsoever is of this kind, should be
thoroughly inquired into.' And this great founder or renovator of the
sober inductive system of investigation even so far leaves it a matter
of speculative inquiry, whether imagination may not be so powerful
that it can actually operate upon a plant, that he says: 'This likewise
should be made upon plants, and that diligently; as if you should tell
a man that such a tree would die this year, and will him, at these and
these times, to go unto it and see how it thriveth.' I presume that
no philosopher has followed such recommendations: had some great
philosopher done so, possibly we should by this time know all the
secrets of what is popularly called witchcraft."

And as Faber here paused, there came a strange laugh from the fantastic
she-oak-tree overhanging the stream,--a wild, impish laugh.

"Pooh! it is but the great kingfisher, the laughing-bird of the
Australian bush," said Julius Faber, amused at my start of superstitious
alarm.

We walked on for some minutes in musing silence, and the rude log-hut in
which my wise companion had his home came in view,--the flocks grazing
on undulous pastures, the lone drinking at a watercourse fringed by the
slender gum-trees, and a few fields, laboriously won from the luxuriant
grassland, rippling with the wave of corn.

I halted, and said, "Rest here for a few moments, till I gather up the
conclusions to which your speculative reasoning seems to invite me."

We sat down on a rocky crag, half mantled by luxuriant creepers with
vermilion buds.

"From the guesses," said I, "which you have drawn from the erudition of
others and your own ingenious and reflective inductions, I collect this
solution of the mysteries, by which the experience I gain from my
senses confounds all the dogmas approved by my judgment. To the rational
conjectures by which, when we first conversed on the marvels that
perplexed me, you ascribe to my imagination, predisposed by mental
excitement, physical fatigue or derangement, and a concurrence
of singular events tending to strengthen such predisposition, the
phantasmal impressions produced on my senses,--to these conjectures
you now add a new one, more startling and less admitted by sober
physiologists. You conceive it possible that persons endowed with a rare
and peculiar temperament can so operate on imagination, and, through
the imagination, on the senses