Physical disturbances have, in all times, accompanied certain nervous maladies; fools, epileptics, cataleptics, victims of hysteria have exceptional faculties, are subject to infectious hallucinations and produce occasionally, in the atmosphere or in surrounding objects, certain commotions and derangements. He who is hallucinated exteriorises his dreams and is tormented by his own shadow; the body is surrounded with its own reflections, distorted by the sufferings of the brain; the subject beholds his own image in the Astral Light; the powerful currents of that light, acting like a magnet, displace and overturn furniture; noises are then heard and voices sound as in dreams. These phenomena, so often repeated at this day that they have become vulgar, were attributed by our fathers to phantoms and demons. Voltairian philosophy found it more easy to deny them, treating the ocular witnesses of the most incontestable facts as so many imbeciles and idiots. What, for example, is better accredited than the extraordinary convulsions at the grave of Paris the deacon, or at the meetings of Saint-Médard ecstatics? What is the explanation of the strange buffetings demanded by the convulsionaries? Blows rained by thousands on the head, compressions which would have crushed a hippopotamus, torsions of breasts with iron pincers, even crucifixion with nails driven into hands and feet? And then the superhuman contortions and levitations? The followers of Voltaire refused to see anything but sport and frolic therein; the Jansenists cried miracle; the true Catholics sighed; science which should have intervened, and that only, to explain the fantastic disease, held aloof. It is to her nevertheless that there now belong the Ursulines of Loudun, the nuns of Louviers, the convulsionaries and the American mediums. The phenomena of magnetism have placed science on the path of new discoveries, and the coming chemical synthesis will lead our physicians to a knowledge of the Astral Light. When this universal force is once known, what will prevent them from determining the strength, number and direction of its magnets? A revolution will follow in science and there will be a return to the Transcendental Magic of Chaldea. Much has been talked about the presbytery of Cideville; De Mirville, Gougenot Desmousseaux and other uncritical believers have seen in the strange occurrences which took place therein a contemporary revelation of the devil; but the same things happened at Saint-Maur in 1706, and thither all Paris flocked. There were great rappings on walls, beds rocked without being touched, other furniture was displaced. The manifestations finished in a climax during which the master of the house, a young man of twenty-four or twenty-five years old, and a person of weak constitution, fell into a deep swoon and believed that he heard spirits speaking to him at great length, though he could never repeat subsequently a single word that they said.