Having attained a great height perpendicularly above the spot of our departure, we suddenly dashed off with the speed of an express locomotive, toward the northeast. Whither we were hastening, I knew not; nor did I trouble my mind with any useless conjectures. I felt secure in the power of my companion, and sure of her protection. I knew that by some unaccountable process she had neutralized the gravitating force of a material body, had elevated me hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet in the atmosphere, and by some mysterious charm was attracting me toward a distant bourne. Years before, whilst a medical student at the University of Louisiana, the professor of _materia medica_ had opened his course of lectures with an inquiry into the origin and essence of gravitation, and I had listened respectfully, but at that time doubtingly, to the theory he propounded. He stated that it was not unphilosophical to believe that the time would arrive when the gravitating power of dense bodies would be overcome, and balloons constructed to navigate the air with the same unerring certainty that ships traversed the ocean. He declared that gravitation itself was not a _cause_ but an _effect_; that it might be produced by the rotation of the earth upon its axis, or by some undiscovered current of electricity, or by some recondite and hitherto undetected agent or force in nature. Magnetism he thought a species of electricity, and subsequent investigations have convinced me that _sympathy_ or _animal magnetism_ was akin to the same parent power. By means of this latter agent I had seen the human body rendered so light that two persons could raise it with a single finger properly applied. More than this, I had but recently witnessed at Castillo, dead matter clothed with life and motion, and elevated several feet into the air without the aid of any human agency. This age I knew well to be an age of wonders. Nature was yielding up her secrets on every hand; the boundary between the natural and the spiritual had been broken down; new worlds were flashing upon the eyes of the followers of Galileo almost nightly from the ocean depths of space. Incalculable treasures had been discovered in the most distant ends of the earth, and I, unlettered hind that I was, did not presume to limit the power of the great Creator, and because an act seemed impossible to my narrow vision, and within my limited experience, to cry aloud, _imposture_, or to mutter sneeringly, _insanity_. Before proceeding farther with the thread of this narrative, the attention of the reader is solicited to the careful perusal of the following extracts from Stephens's _Travels in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan_, published at New York in 1841.