Put all these ingredients into the bottle of fancy, digest for several days, and take forty drops at about nine in the morning, or a few minutes before you receive a portion of the Magnetic Effluvia. They will make the effluvia have a surprising effect, etc., etc. In 1785 there appeared a mock funeral oration upon Mesmer, travestying with endless extravagance his pretensions and methods. Caricature was a favorite mode of attack; and the examples that have escaped destruction vividly preserve the spirit and the local color of the times. Yet both learned and unlearned opinion was divided, and the press was the medium of eulogy as well as of denunciation. Of still greater importance were the discoveries of the Marquis de Puységur, one of Mesmer's disciples, which diverted the interest in animal magnetism into a new channel; and, finally, the turmoil of the French Revolution drove Mesmerism into obscurity, and Mesmer to a retreat in the town of Frauenfeld, near the lake of Constance. Our last picture of Mesmer shows him living in simple seclusion, complaining of the world's treatment of him, performing cures among those about him, and cherishing to the end his belief in animal magnetism. He died March 5, 1815, at Meersburg, where he lies buried. IV The system of animal magnetism Mesmer summed up in a series of twenty-seven propositions presented entirely without proof, asserting the existence of an "universally diffused subtle fluid, appearing in all portions of the celestial system, and affecting the animal economy by insinuating itself into the nerves; it has properties analogous to that of the magnet, may be reflected like light, propagated like sound, and may be increased, opposed, accumulated, transmitted to another object, and transported; furthermore this principle, which is, in a way, a sixth sense artificially acquired, will cure nervous disease directly, and others indirectly by provoking salutary crises, thus bringing the art of healing to perfection." Mesmer's methods varied at different stages of his career. The use of magnets as the main or exclusive factor in his cures, he seems to have abandoned before going to Paris; at first he made the passes with his hands, or with an iron rod, directing his fingers toward his patient, and emphasizing these movements by strokings and rubbings. The object of these manipulations was to concentrate and send out the magnetism with which his body was saturated. This magnetism he could transfer to others or to inanimate objects. "I have magnetized paper, bread, wool, silk, leather, stone, glass, water, different metals, wood, men, dogs,--in one word, all that I have touched, so that these substances produced the same effects on the patients as the magnets." When his increasing success no longer allowed him to attend personally to all his patients, he employed a valet toucher, or imparted the curative properties to water, to a tree, etc. At the height of his career he