of others, as to exceed even the powers
ascribed to the practitioners of mesmerism' and electro-biology,
and give a certain foundation of truth to the old tales of magic and
witchcraft. You imply that Margrave may be a person thus gifted, and
hence the influence he unquestionably exercised over Lilian, and over,
perhaps, less innocent agents, charmed or impelled by his will. And not
discarding, as I own I should have been originally induced to do,
the queries or suggestions adventured by Bacon in his discursive
speculations on Nature, to wit, 'that there be many things, some of them
inanimate, that operate upon the spirits of men by secret sympathy and
antipathy,' and to which Bacon gave the quaint name of 'imaginants,' so
even that wand, of which I have described to you the magic-like effects,
may have had properties communicated to it by which it performs the work
of the magician, as mesmerists pretend that some substance mesmerized
by them can act on the patient as sensibly as if it were the mesmerizer
himself. Do I state your suppositions correctly?"

"Yes; always remembering that they are only suppositions, and
volunteered with the utmost diffidence. But since, thus seated in the
early wilderness, we permit ourselves the indulgence of childlike guess,
may it not be possible, apart from the doubtful question whether a man
can communicate to an inanimate material substance a power to act upon
the mind or imagination of another man--may it not, I say, be possible
that such a substance may contain in itself such a virtue or property
potent over certain constitutions, though not over all. For instance, it
is in my experience that the common hazel-wood will strongly affect some
nervous temperaments, though wholly without effect on others. I remember
a young girl, who having taken up a hazel-stick freshly cut, could not
relax her hold of it; and when it was wrenched away from her by force,
was irresistibly attracted towards it, repossessed herself of it, and,
after holding it a few minutes, was cast into a kind of trance, in which
she beheld phantasmal visions. Mentioning this curious case, which I
supposed unique, to a learned brother of our profession, he told me that
he had known other instances of the effect of the hazel upon nervous
temperaments in persons of both sexes. Possibly it was some such
peculiar property in the hazel that made it the wood selected for the
old divining-rod. Again, we know that the bay-tree,