The National Quarterly Review, Ed. by E.I. Sears (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: accidents in consequence of the ideas they had during their somnambulism. Even M. Rostan assures us that " magnetism, badly directed, may cause the gravest accidents. I have seen it," he says, " produce general uneasiness, acute pains, obstinate head-aches, violent cardialgias, paralyses temporary, but very annoying and very painful; a general perturbation of the system that predisposes it to every kind of nervous affection; a feeling of excessive fatigue, great weakness, extreme emaciation, suffocation, fainting; and I doubt not that even death itself would be the result if the magnetizer were to paralyze the muscles of respiration. Mental alienation and melancholy have frequently resulted from it." In fine, cases have been recorded where the patients died in the hands of the magnetizers. We now take our leave of this wonderful system, and leave our readers t3 form their own estimate of it. After all we have said it must be candidly avowed that, whatever may be the conclusion we may come to in regard to its character, animal magnetism has still something about it that (granting all the facts reported of it to have a real existence) is, in the present state of our scientific knowledge, wholly inexplicable. Art. III.?1. Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances, for the year 1865. 8vo., pp. 842. 2. Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances, for the year 1866. 8vo., pp. 394. The general public has but a vague idea of the combination of talents required for the successful management of the finances of a great nation. In this country, especially, the financial department of the government is regarded as little more than a splendid sinecure, in which it would be superfluous to place a man of more than third or fourth-ra...