perfect harmony in aim and action of these two so dissimilar natures, and their admirable co-operation in furthering the well-being of their fellow-creatures, the special gifts of each being employed to the same end, my father’s theoretically, my mother’s in the direction of practical utility. Of the cures which the latter was enabled to work, I shall tell elsewhere; suffice it to say in this place, that they were effected with a swiftness, and attended with circumstances so remarkable as to surpass if anything those of Szápary himself. In later years, when the extraordinary cures wrought by Metzger and other masseurs were spoken of in my mother’s presence, it did not astonish anyone who knew her that she should calmly remark, with a pitying smile--“That is all very well, but it is nothing to what I could do! I had but to stretch out my hand and say--Rise up, thou art healed!” The somnambulistic experiments I witnessed were perhaps more marvellous than all the rest. It would almost seem as if in the case of the somnambulist the law of gravitation were abolished, so entirely free from the trammels of material existence does the human body appear to be while in this state. Certainly my mother often appeared to us no longer to tread the earth, she seemed to float rather than walk, and any further and more complete abolition of what we are accustomed to term the laws of nature, would assuredly have occasioned among us no surprise at all. No amount of familiarity, on the other hand, could ever do away with the feeling of awe, with which my mother’s ecstatic trance invariably inspired us. Unconscious of all around, she sang and prayed--the words and melody alike of her own composition; it was a deeply moving spectacle. Brought up in an atmosphere so highly charged with the marvellous, it has ever been impossible to me to assume a sceptical attitude towards mysteries which elude my comprehension. The word supernatural seems to me to be an absolute contradiction in terms. Who are we that we should dare to set limits to the forces of nature, and to decide that this or that occurrence is beyond her control? Did we but understand such events aright, we must needs acknowledge them to be perfectly natural. Egyptian priests of old, and Indian fakirs of the present day may alike laugh us to scorn, that in our ignorance and impotence we presume to question the existence of forces whose workings they have fathomed and turned to such good account. Recourse to the supernatural is but a return to nature. For this reason it may well be that outside the domain of surgery, wherein such incontestable triumphs have been achieved, of the whole of our modern medical practice the so-called nature-cures will in the end alone survive. They rest indeed on a purely rational basis, the treatment being none other than the art of transforming pathological phenomena into therapeutical processes.