Dr. Passavent, whose very philosophical work on this occult department of nature is well worth attention, considers the fact of these appearances far too well established to be disputed; and he enters into some curious disquisitions with regard to what the Germans call _far-working_, or the power of acting on bodies at a distance without any sensible conductor, instancing the case of a gymnotus, which was kept alive for four months in Stockholm, and which, when urged by hunger, could kill fish at a distance without contact, adding that it rarely miscalculated the amount of the shock necessary to its purpose. These and all such effects are attributed by this school of physiologists to the supposed imponderable—the nervous ether I have elsewhere mentioned—which Dr. Passavent conceives, in cases of somnambulism, certain sicknesses, and the approach of death, to be less closely united to its material conductors, the nerves, and therefore capable of being more or less detached, and acting at a distance, especially on those with whom relationship, friendship, or love, establishes a rapport, or polarity; and he observes that intervening substances or distance can no more impede this agency than they do the agency of mineral magnetism. And he considers that we must here seek for the explanation of those curious so-called coincidences of pictures falling, and clocks and watches stopping, at the moment of a death, which we frequently find recorded. With respect to the wraiths, he observes that the more the ether is freed, as by trance or the immediate approach of death, the more easily the soul sets itself in rapport with distant persons; and that thus it either acts magically, so that the seer perceives the real actual body of the person that is acting upon him, or else that he sees the ethereal body, which presents the perfect form of the fleshly one, and which, while the organic life proceeds, can be momentarily detached and appear elsewhere; and this ethereal body he holds to be the fundamental form, of which the external body is only the copy, or husk.