Bodily functions and bodily health are regulated and sustained by what may be called the lower nerve centres in the medulla of the brain. It is by the exercise of these centres, which in turn control the circulation, the secretion of various glands, &c., that the body combats disease. This work is continually going on and we are for the most part quite unconscious of it. But, says Mr. Dearmer, ‘we now know that these centres are in direct connexion with the higher centres of the cortex of the brain.’ I should think we do. So did our ancestors a hundred years ago. Their knowledge of the work of such centres as the vasomotor, the respiratory, the heat-regulating, &c., was fragmentary and imperfect to the last degree, but not one of them had any doubt that myriads of nerve fibres connected the cortex with the medulla. Let us, therefore, know how to stimulate the cortex, and all disease (organic as well as functional) can be cured. Hence, when our Lord cured Bartimæus’s blindness, and when a ‘healer’ cures locomotor ataxy, they are performing a function quite as natural as in the case of a doctor who cures malaria with quinine or restores the use of muscles in musculo-spiral paralysis by the use of the interrupted current. This sounds plausible enough. There is nothing very new in it; indeed, when we come to analyse it, we shall see that, so far as general principles go, there is nothing which was not perfectly familiar in Sydenham’s day, or which the most materialistic practitioner of our own time would not admit without a moment’s hesitation. But, of the limitations of his process, Mr. Dearmer only seems to have a confused idea. Let us take one of the instances which he adduces in illustration of his argument. He is speaking (p. 33) of the familiar phenomenon of blushing. ‘When a person blushes,’ says our author, ‘the small arteries are relaxed and dilate, the amount of blood in them is increased, and this hot red fluid flows in such quantities through the capillaries of the skin that the skin itself becomes hot and red. It is strange that the thought “He says I am a pretty girl” should cause the small arteries to behave in this way; but the physiological explanation is simple enough. These arteries are supplied with muscles which regulate them, and all muscles are worked by nerves. The thought in the higher conscious centres has somehow seen fit to hitch itself on to the arterial muscles, just as when we telephone to a friend in the City the exchange connects us on to his office. _Now, supposing it to be possible to cure a man, say of indigestion by thought, the process would be the same._’