This recognition of the power of suggestion is in many instances taking a most undesirable form, and I commend to your notice, in support of this observation, numerous advertisements in certain classes of magazines--many of you must have seen many specimens of that kind--offering for a certain sum of money to put you in the way of getting personal influence, mental power, power of suggestion, as the advertisements very unblushingly put it, for any purpose that you may desire. Some of them even go into further particulars, telling you the particular sort of purposes for which you can employ this, all of them certainly being such uses as no one should ever attempt to make of it. Therefore, this recognition of the power of suggestion, say even as a mere money-making power, to leave alone other misapplications of it, is a feature which is taking hold, so to say, of certain sections of the public who do not realise a higher platform in these things. It is deplorable that it should be so, but it is in the nature of things unavoidable. You have a power which can be used affirmatively, and which can be used negatively, which can be used for higher purposes, and can be used for lower purposes, and consequently you will find numbers of people who, as soon as they get hold of it, will at once think only of the lower purposes, not of the higher. In support of what I say--although this is by no means, I suppose, intended as a low application, probably it is intended as a high application, but I cannot say I agree with it--but to show you that I am talking from actual facts I will read you a note which I have made from the _Daily Mail_, of the 20th January, that I daresay some of you may have seen. It is an article headed "Killing by Prayer," and the article goes on to say that a certain circular has been sent round to the different hospitals and other places where the study of vivisection goes forward to this effect. In this circular, signed with the letters "M. C.," the writer says that he accidentally heard of a person who was in the habit of praying from time to time for the death of one of our leading vivisectors and that always the man indicated died. That is what M. C. heard by chance during conversation at a hotel dinner. Then thinking over this, M. C. goes on to say that he (or she) tried praying that the man most likely to cause suffering to innocent subjects by his experiments might be removed, and the consequence was that about a fortnight later one of our most distinguished medical scientists died.