or laurel, was
dedicated to the oracular Pythian Apollo. Now wherever, in the old
world, we find that the learning of the priests enabled them to exhibit
exceptional phenomena, which imposed upon popular credulity, there was a
something or other which is worth a philosopher's while to explore;
and, accordingly, I always suspected that there was in the laurel
some property favourable to ecstatic vision in highly impressionable
temperaments. My suspicion, a few years ago, was justified by the
experience of a German physician, who had under his care a cataleptic
or ecstatic patient, and who assured me that he found nothing in this
patient so stimulated the state of 'sleep-waking,' or so disposed that
state to indulge in the hallucinations of prevision, as the berry of
the laurel.(10) Well, we do not know what this wand that produced a
seemingly magical effect upon you was really composed of. You did not
notice the metal employed in the wire, which you say communicated a
thrill to the sensitive nerves in the palm of the hand. You cannot tell
how far it might have been the vehicle of some fluid force in nature. Or
still more probably, whether the pores of your hand insensibly imbibed,
and communicated to the brain, some of those powerful narcotics from
which the Buddhists and the Arabs make unguents that induce visionary
hallucinations, and in which substances undetected in the hollow of the
wand, or the handle of the wand itself, might be steeped.(11) One thing
we do know, namely, that amongst the ancients, and especially in the
East, the construction of wands for magical purposes was no commonplace
mechanical craft, but a special and secret art appropriated to men who
cultivated with assiduity all that was then known of natural science
in order to extract from it agencies that might appear supernatural.
Possibly, then, the rods or wands of the East, of which Scripture makes
mention, were framed upon some principles of which we in our day are
very naturally ignorant, since we do not ransack science for the same
secrets; and thus, in the selection or preparation of the material
employed, mainly consisted whatever may be referrible to natural
philosophical causes in the antique science of Rhabdomancy, or
divination and enchantment by wands. The staff, or wand, of which you
tell me, was, you say, made of iron or steel and tipped with crystal.
Possibly iron and crystal do really contain some properties not hitherto
scientificall