Take, for instance, the following case recorded by Dr. Braid of Glasgow. Miss R. had suffered from ophthalmia and was totally blind. She could not discern a single letter of the title-page of a book placed close to her, though some of the letters were a quarter of an inch long. Dr. Braid placed the patient in a condition of hypnotism or artificial somnambulism, and directed the nervous force, or sustained attention of the mind, to the eyes by wafting over them. After a first sitting of about ten minutes she was able to read a great part of the title-page, and after four more sittings she was able to read the smallest-sized print in a newspaper, and was quite cured for the rest of her life. In another case, that of Mrs. S., blindness of the left eye had occurred owing to an attack of rheumatic fever, the structure of the eye, both external and internal, being considerably injured, and more than half the cornea covered by an opaque film. After a few sittings the cornea became transparent, and the patient was cured. In both these cases the blind were made to see by processes which were purely mechanical, for hypnotism was induced by the simple means of making the patient strain her attention on some fixed idea or object, commonly on a black wafer stuck on a white wall, and the stimulation of the optic nerve to greater activity did the rest. And if the blind could be made to see, _a fortiori_ the deaf were made to hear, and the lame and halt to walk, by the same mechanical process. Here there is an explanation of nine-tenths of all recorded miracles by purely natural causes.