un's, and in the same volume occurs the wondrous tale of
Colonel Townsend, who could suspend his animation at pleasure.

There is certainly a good deal of risk, as well as of convenience, in
suspended animation. People do not always welcome Rip Van Winkle when he
returns to life, as we would all welcome Mr. Jefferson if he revisited
the glimpses of the footlights,

"The hard heir strides about the lands,
And will not yield them for a day."

There is the horrible chance of being buried alive, which was always
present to the mind of Edgar Poe. It occurs in one of his half-humorous
stories, where a cataleptic man, suddenly waking in a narrow bed, in the
smell of earthy mould, believes he has been interred, but finds himself
mistaken. In the "Fall of The House of Usher" the wretched brother, with
his nervous intensity of sensation, hears his sister for four days
stirring in her vault before she makes her escape. In the "Strange
Effects of Mesmerism on a Dying Man," the animation is mesmerically
suspended at the very instant when it was about naturally to cease. The
results, when the passes were reversed, and the half fled life was half
restored, are described in a passage not to be recommended to sensitive
readers. M. About, uses the same general idea in the fantastic plot of
his "L'Homme a l'Oreille Cassee," and the risk of breakage was insisted
on by M. About as well as by the inventive Australian reporter. Mr.
Clarke Russell has also frozen a Pirate. Thus the idea of suspended
animation is "in the air," is floating among the visions of men of
genius. It is, perhaps, for the great continent beneath the Southern
Cross to realize the dreams of savages, of seers, of novelists, of poets,
of Yogis, of Plotinus, of M. About, and of Swedenborg. Swedenborg, too,
was a suspended animationist, if we may use the term. What else than
suspension of outer life was his "internal breathing," by which his body
existed while his soul was in heaven, hell, or the ends of the earth?
When the Australian discovery is universally believed in (and acted on),
then, and perhaps not till then, will be the time for the great
unappreciated. They will go quietly to sleep, to waken a hundred years
hence, and learn how posterity likes their pictures and poems. They may
not always be satisfied with the results, but no artist will disbelieve
in the favourable verdict of posterity till the supposed Australian
method is applied to men as