strumous mal-assimilation; and the physician is the proper person to guide those countless patients and halfpatients to their respective tables, although sensible people in this predicament will be able to help their medical adviser to a right conclusion, if not to supersede him altogether, by a patient course of experiments on themselves. The healthier residue of society, which still comprises the greater proportion of the creditable working classes, from the statesman down to the intelligent artisan, had better hold by the frugal use of a wellcooked diet of flesh-meat and vegetables, accompanied or not by the very limited addition of the alcoholic and alkaloid stimulants. If science were in a condition to furnish any more particular counsel, it might offer the suggestion that the protein or flesh-forming constituents of food should be taken from the animal kingdom, and the starch-like or heat-producing fuel of the system from the vegetable world. According to this hint, bread stuffs should be used less, potatoes and other roots, with fruits and leaves, more than is commonly done: and when the former are taken, it should not be along with beef and mutton, but as their substitutes; an arrangement which is closely approximated by the daily bills of fare adopted by the upper and middle classes of society-were it only accompanied by other obediences. Such is the mixed diet, always understanding that it be thoroughly well cooked, which is the best for the less unsound; and the best for the more morbid too, as soon as their milk-diet or their altogether vegetarian fare shall have made them equal to it: if it is not mere vegetative plumpness or muscular strength that is wanted, but the perfect freedom and full activity of the whole nervous system, from the front columns of the spinal marrow to the top of the brain. On the whole, then, the stout majority of

society are not very far wrong regarding the choice and mixture of their food and its quality: but it is the unanimous opinion of physicians and other observers, that we are an overfed people in the mass, just as undeniably as every fifth man is underfed; and to those two dietetic extremes, a great proportion of the constitutional disorder of the nation must be traced. It is certainly in quantity that the greatest errors are almost universally made. Temperance is therefore the virtue to be insisted on, and probably some rigour of temperance. Vegetarianism is temperate by necessity, and that constitutes the greater part of its virtues; and if anybody, who has been restored to some measure of health by the observance of it, were just to return by degrees to a mixed diet, but to restrain himself to half the quantity he used to take, one might almost promise him a nobler, if not a lustier life. Temperance is morally better than abstinence, being a continual discipline of the will; and, in the present instance, it is physically better too. It is perhaps superior to abstinence, both physiologically and spiritually, in regard to alcoholics also, and indeed to all lawful indulgences; but temperance is difficult to many, a dreadful task to some, and impossible to not a few. It is therefore a good thing for society that the cause of abstinence has its party, grasping at the poor drunkard and anticipating the fall of the weak; for it is not necessary to join in all the generous crusades of the day against disease and vice, in order to wish them well. At the same time, we confess ourselves so lacerated and heart-broken by the contemplation of our country's drunkenness, that it is only with diffidence that we dissent from those who condemn wines and beers and spirits as altogether bad for the constitution of man. But this is not the place to enter into that important contro

versy; and it has been adduced here solely for the sake of illustrating the supreme worth of true and universal temperance, or the spirit of obedience to all the laws of man's manifold and miraculous nature,—the physical, the vegetative, the animal, the intellectual, the moral, the spiritual, and the amazing union of all these categories in one harmonious code. Temperance is the very angel of health; and health is literally nothing but another name for the wholeness of the stuff and manner of our existence.

THE METHODOLOGY OF MESMERISM.

(MASSACHUSETTS QUARTERLY REVIEW.-Nos. VII. and VIII.)

It is by no means the purpose of this essay to enter into an extensive and penetrating criticism of the details of Mesmerism. Its object is not nearly so difficult of execution. It simply proposes to consider how far the phenomena of zoo-magnetism do really deserve the serious investigation of inductive science; to convey to such readers as may not yet have attended to the subject, even as a literary appearance, some vivid conceptions concerning the sorts of things asserted by mesmeric authors; to pronounce a short, certainly not an uncharitable, and if possible a just, scientific judgment regarding the general character of the statements of the science; and to bring the universally accredited fact of the mere mesmeric sleep or trance into harmony with the system of Nature, so far as that system seems to be understood.

It is well known to the students of modern British literature that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the 'inspired charity-boy' of Charles Lamb, a poet of deep-going insight and most musical expression in youth, a well-read and original metaphysician in manhood, an agonising divine in old age, and altogether one of the most lustrous of modern spirits, bestowed a great deal of study on the subject now approached. It is duly recorded in a note to Southey's Life of Wesley, that, after having considered

the question in all the aspects in which it had then been presented, and that during the course of nine years, he could not conscientiously decide either for or against the claims of Mesmerism. It is worthy of notice, however, that the word Mesmerism stood in the vocabulary of that time as the sign of nothing more nor less than the apparent transference of one species of sensibility to the organ of another, on the one hand, and the faculty of far-seeing on the other; an equivalent which is far from sufficient for the symbol at this time of day. Furthermore, Coleridge did undeniably study the evidence in favour of such Mesmerism from an unwarrantable point of view. For example, he examined the testimony for the so-called fact of far-seeing in inseparable connexion with the theory usually advanced in explanation of it; being of the prejudged opinion that nothing less than such an hypothesis would be adequate to the satisfactory explanation of the facts.' This was to investigate the grounds on which an asserted thing was made to rest; but it was to investigate them with an intellect predisposed against the only conceivable idea of the possible fact, and that was to investigate them with an intellect predisposed against the very possibility of the asserted fact itself. Yet the evidences of Mesmerism were able to bear the scrutiny of this searching and not uncoloured eye: They were 'too strong and consentaneous for a candid mind to be satisfied of its falsehood, or its solvability on the supposition of imposture or coincidence; too fugacious and unfixable to support any theory that supposes the always potential, and, under certain conditions and circumstances, occasionally actual existence of a corresponding faculty (of far-seeing, in-seeing, foreseeing, &c.) in the human soul.' The parenthesis in the last sentence is our own.