particular, extraordinarily skillful in diagnosing, prescribing for, and occasionally foretelling the course of diseases in herself and others--the proof must have seemed to the bystanders complete."[71] [Footnote 71: "Modern Spiritualism," Podmore, Vol. I, p. 77.] _The Beginnings of Trance-Mediumship_ We have here plainly enough the beginnings of trance mediumship. It needed only unstable personalities, capable of self-induced trance states, so to widen all this as to supply the bases of spiritistic faith and the material for the immensely laborious investigation of the Society for Psychical Research. In the main, however, French interest in Mesmerism and animal magnetism took a more scientific turn and issued in the brilliant French studies in hypnotism. Spiritualism has made little headway in Catholic countries. The authority of the Church is thrown so strongly against it as to prohibit the interest of the credulous and the penetrating minds of the southern European scientists have been more concerned with the problems of abnormal personality than the continued existence of the discarnate. The interest in Germany took another line. There was less scientific investigation of hypnotism and trance states as abnormal modifications of personality and far more interest in clairvoyance and spirit existence. Men whose names carried weight accepted the spiritistic explanation of phenomena ranging from broken flower pots to ghosts. Very likely the German tendency toward mysticism and speculation explains this. Jung followed Swedenborg and the mystics generally in affirming a psychic body, but was a pioneer in associating it with the luminiferous ether in a range of speculation which in our time supplies an hypothetical scientific basis for the environment of the discarnate. (So Sir Oliver Lodge.) Podmore concludes that the foundations of modern Spiritualism were laid by the German magnetists of the first half of the nineteenth century.