The above-mentioned witness, who saw their almost incredible sufferings, Carré de Montgéron, states that he himself used an iron club ending in a ball and weighing from twenty to thirty pounds. One of the female enthusiasts complained that the ordinary blows were not sufficient to give her relief, whereupon he beat her sixty times with all his strength. But this also was unavailing, and a large and more powerful man who was standing near had to take the fearful instrument and with his strong arms gave her a hundred additional blows! The tension of her muscles must have been most extraordinary, for she not only bore the blows, which would have killed a strong person in natural health, but the wall against which she was leaning actually began to tremble and totter from the violent concussion. Nor were the blows simply resisted by the turgescence of the body; the skin itself seemed to have been modified in a manner unknown in a state of health. Thus one of the brothers Marion felt nothing of thrusts made by a sharp-pointed knife against his abdomen and the skin was in no instance injured. To do this the trance in which he lay must necessarily have induced an entire change of the organic atoms, and this is one of the most important magic phenomena connected with this class of visions, which will be discussed in another place. It is well known that the cures performed at the grave of the Abbé Paris and the terrible scenes enacted there by these _convulsionnaires_ excited so much attention that at last the king saw himself compelled to put a stop to the proceedings. After a careful investigation of the whole matter by men specially appointed for the purpose, the grounds were guarded, access was prohibited, and the wags of Paris placed at the entrance the following announcement: "_Défense de par le Roy. Défense à Dieu, De faire miracle en ce lieu!_" Ireland had in the seventeenth century her Greatrakes, who, according to unimpeachable testimony, cured nearly every disease known to man, by his simple touch--and fervent prayer.