Or, if instead of passing into a single operator, as in the case of Surin, the diseased contagion should suddenly expand itself among a crowd of bystanders, there would be nothing to wonder at, although enough to deplore, in such a catastrophe. It would be no more than has already happened in all the epidemics of lycanthropy and witchmania, of the dancers of St. Vitas, of the Jumpers, Quakers, and Revivalists, of the Mewers, Barkers, and Convulsionnaires. The absence of religious pretensions among the operators seems as yet to be the chief guarantee against such results. If instead of being made rigid and lucid by the manipulations of a professor, the patients should find themselves cast into that state by contact with the tomb of a preacher, or with the reliques of a saint, society would soon be revisited with all the evils of _pseudo_-miracles and supposed demoniacal possessions. The comparatively innocent frenzy of the followers of Father Mathew, was the nearest approach to a social disturbance of that kind that our country has been visited by since the barking epidemic of the fourteenth century. "In the county of Leicester, a person travelling along the road," says Camden, "found a pair of gloves, fit for his hands, as he thought; but when he put them on, he lost his speech immediately, and could do nothing but bark like a dog; nay, from that moment, the men and women, old and young, throughout the whole country, barked like dogs, and the children like whelps. This plague continued, with some eighteen days, with others a month, and with some for two years; and, like a contagious distemper, at last infected the neighboring counties, and set them a barking too." If mesmerism did no more than demonstrate, as it has done, that all the supposed evidences of modern inspiration, as well as of modern demoniacal possession and ghost-craft, are but the manifestations of a physical disorder, capable of being induced by ordinary agencies, it would have done a great service to the cause of social and religious stability. In addition to this, it has furnished surgery with a new narcotic, perhaps with a new anti-spasmodic. It is not impossible that here, at length, a means may have been found for combating the horrors of hydrophobia. Its higher pretensions of clairvoyance and provision, if not proved, are at least not yet satisfactorily disproved. Its admitted usefulness may, perhaps, counterbalance its perils; but in every exercise of it, whether curative or speculative, it is never to be forgotten, that the phenomena are those of disease, and that the production of disease, save for the counteraction of other maladies more hurtful, is in itself an evil. S. F. A CHAPTER OF EPITAPHS. From Sharp’s Magazine. By F. Lawrence.