"Many of us have been greatly troubled by the conduct of our mediums, and often puzzled by their careful prepared attempts at fraud. Mediums we have met and loved, because they have given us proof after proof of the 'gates ajar' for angel visitors, have been presently detected in frauds that required days of careful preparation. We have cried, 'Down with the frauds!' and insisted that they should return to wash-tub and spade for an honest living. "We have omitted to keep in view that one who is a medium Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays must also be a medium Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and we have neglected to learn the lessons of our own experience. I was talking recently to a gentleman of prominence, twice sheriff of his county, who was narrating with glee how he had mesmerised a young man, and then told him, 'At noon to-morrow you will be lame, and it will last two hours.' Of course it happened much to the poor fellows perplexity, but my friend would have been surprised to discover that therein was the entire case of the French sensitives and of our poor mediums. "A very important thought is that an hypnotic influence need not spring from any verbal expression. We all carry with us an influence which strikes every sensitive we meet; and if we sit with her when she is, of course, specially passive, she must receive a yet more marked influence. There is a photographic curiosity now often exhibited which, I think, illustrates the thought I want to emphasize. A family or a class can be photographed, one by one, at exactly the same focus and on the same negative, with a result that you have a clear and distinct face, not of any one's personality, but that actually combines the features of the whole into a new individual unlike any of the sitters." "This is the very influence we cast upon a sensitive when she sits for us in a miscellaneous circle. We cannot say that any one of us has powerfully affected her, but we know the entire influence has got control and possession, and that influence follows her, too often with irresistible power." The publication of a work on animal magnetism by Binet and Fere of Paris prompts the following sketch of the subject by the _Boston Herald_, a newspaper which pays great attention to anything foreign or anything from the old school profession, but ignores that which is American and original. The reader will observe that the writers are all in the dark, unable to explain the phenomena they describe. PROGRESS OF MAGNETISM.