upon him, and binding his imagination by a stronger, so that he could think of no other card.’ You see this sage anticipated our modern electro-biologists! And the learned man then shrewdly asked Lord Bacon, ‘Did the juggler tell the card to the man himself who had thought of it, or bid another tell it?’ ‘He bade another tell it,’ answered Lord Bacon. ‘I thought so,’ returned his learned acquaintance, ‘for the juggler himself could not have put on so strong an imagination; but by telling the card to the other, who believed the juggler was some strange man who could do strange things, that other man caught a strong imagination.’(9) The whole story is worth reading, because Lord Bacon evidently thinks it conveys a guess worth examining. And Lord Bacon, were he now living, would be the man to solve the mysteries that branch out of mesmerism or (so-called) spiritual manifestation, for he would not pretend to despise their phenomena for fear of hurting his reputation for good sense. Bacon then goes on to state that there are three ways to fortify the imagination. ‘First, authority derived from belief in an art and in the man who exercises it; secondly, means to quicken and corroborate the imagination; thirdly, means to repeat and refresh it.’ For the second and the third he refers to the practices of magic, and proceeds afterwards to state on what things imagination has most force,--‘upon things that have the lightest and easiest motions, and, therefore, above all, upon the spirits of men, and, in them, on such affections as move lightest,--in love, in fear, in irresolution. And,’ adds Bacon, earnestly, in a very different spirit from that which dictates to the sages of our time the philosophy of rejecting without trial that which belongs to the Marvellous,--‘and whatsoever is of this kind, should be thoroughly inquired into.’ And this great founder or renovator of the sober inductive system of investigation even so far leaves it a matter of speculative inquiry, whether imagination may not be so powerful that it can actually operate upon a plant, that he says: ‘This likewise should be made upon plants, and that diligently; as if you should tell a man that such a tree would die this year, and will him, at these and these times, to go unto it and see how it thriveth.’ I presume that no philosopher has followed such recommendations: had some great philosopher done so, possibly we should by this time know all the secrets of what is popularly called witchcraft.” And as Faber here paused, there came a strange laugh from the fantastic she-oak-tree overhanging the stream,--a wild, impish laugh. “Pooh! it is but the great kingfisher, the laughing-bird of the Australian bush,” said Julius Faber, amused at my start of superstitious alarm.