effectuum admirandorum Causis seu de Incantationibus, that to cure disease it was necessary to use a strong will, and that the patient should have a vigorous imagination and much faith in the prae cantator.  PARACELSUS asserted the same thing in many passages directly and indirectly.  He regarded medicine as magic and the physician as a wizard who should by a powerful will act on the imagination of the patient.  But from some familiarity with the works of PARACELSUS—­the first folio of the first full edition is before me as I write—­I would say that it would be hard to declare what his marvelous mind did not anticipate in whatever was allied to medicine and natural philosophy.  Thus I have found that long before VAN HELMONT, who has the credit of the discovery, PARACELSUS knew how to prepare silicate of soda, or water-glass.

Hypnotism as practiced at the present day, and with regard to its common results, was familiar to JOHANN JOSEPH GASSNER, a priest in Suabia, of whom LOUIS FIGUIER writes as follows in his Histoire du Merveilleux dans les Temps Modernes, published in 1860: 

“GASSNER, like the Englishman VALENTINE GREAT-RAKES, believed himself called by divine inspiration to cure diseases.  According to the precept of proper charity he began at home—­that is to say on himself.  After being an invalid for five or six years, and consulting, all in vain, many doctors, and taking their remedies all for naught, the idea seized him that such an obstinate malady as his must have some supernatural evil origin, or in other words, that he was possessed by a demon.

“Therefore he conjured this devil of a disorder, in the name of Jesus Christ to leave him—­so it left, and the good GASSNER has put it on record that for sixteen years after he enjoyed perfect health and never had occasion for any remedy, spiritual or otherwise.

“This success made him reflect whether all maladies could not be cured by exorcism . . .  The experiment which he tried on the invalids of his parish were so successful that his renown soon opened through all Suabia, and the regions roundabout.  Then he began to travel, being called for everywhere.”

GASSNER was so successful that at Ratisbon he had, it is said, 6,000 patients of all ranks encamped in tents.  He cured by simply touching with his hands.  But that in which he appears original was that he not only made his patients sleep or become insensible by ordering them to do so but caused them to raise their arms and legs, tremble, feel any kind of pain, as is now done by the hypnotist. “’In a young lady of good family’ he caused laughter and weeping, stiffness of the limbs, absence of sight and hearing, and anaesthesia so as to make the pulse beat at his will.”