I confess, I much prefer this theory of Dr. Passavent’s, which seems to me to go very much to the root of the matter. We have here the “spiritual body” of St. Paul, and the “nerve-spirit” of the somnambulists, and their magical effects are scarcely more extraordinary, if properly considered, than their agency on our own _material_ bodies. It is this ethereal body which obeys the intelligent spirit within, and which is the intermediate agent between the spirit and the fleshly body. We here find the explanation of wraiths, while persons are in trance, or deep sleep, or comatose, this ethereal body can be detached and appear elsewhere; and I think there can be no great difficulty for those who can follow us so far, to go a little further, and admit that this ethereal body must be indestructible, and survive the death of the material one; and that it may, therefore, not only become visible to us under given circumstances, but that it may, also, produce effects bearing some similarity to those it was formerly capable of, since, in acting on our bodies during life, it is already acting on a material substance in a manner so incomprehensible to us, that we might well apply the word _magical_ when speaking of it, were it not that custom has familiarized us to the marvel. It is to be observed, that this idea of a spiritual body is one that pervaded all Christendom in the earlier and purer ages of Christianity, before priestcraft—and by priestcraft I mean the priestcraft of all denominations—had overshadowed and obscured, by its various sectarian heresies, the pure teaching of Jesus Christ. Dr. Ennemoser mentions a curious instance of this _actio in distans_, or far-working. It appears that Van Helmont having asserted that it was possible for a man to extinguish the life of an animal by the eye alone (_oculis intentis_), Rousseau, the naturalist, repeated the experiment, when in the East, and in this manner killed several toads; but on a subsequent occasion, while trying the same experiment at Lyons, the animal, on finding it could not escape, fixed its eyes immovably on him, so that he fell into a fainting fit, and was thought to be dead. He was restored by means of theriacum and viper powder—a truly homeopathic remedy! However, we here probably see the origin of the universal popular persuasion, that there is some mysterious property in the eye of a toad; and also of the so called, superstition of the _evil eye_.