I know instances in which, for several mornings previous to the occurrence of a calamity, persons have awakened with a painful sense of misfortune, for which they could not account, and which was dispersed as soon as they had time to reflect that they had no cause for uneasiness. This is the only kind of presentiment I ever experienced myself; but it has occurred to me twice, in a very marked and unmistakable manner. As soon as the intellectual life, the life of the brain, and the external world, broke in, the instinctive life receded, and the intuitive knowledge was obscured. Or, according to Dr. Ennemoser’s theory, the polar relations changed, and the nerves were busied with conveying sensuous impressions to the brain, their sensibility or positive state now being transferred from the internal to the external periphery. It is by the contrary change that Dr. Ennemoser seeks to explain the insensibility to pain of mesmerized patients. A circumstance of a similar kind to the above occurred in a well-known family in Scotland, the Rutherfords of E——. A lady dreamed that her aunt, who resided at some distance, was murdered by a black servant. Impressed with the liveliness of the vision, she could not resist going to the house of her relation, where the man she had dreamed of (whom I think she had never before seen) opened the door to her. Upon this, she induced a gentleman to watch in the adjoining room during the night; and toward morning, hearing a foot upon the stairs, he opened the door and discovered the black servant carrying up a coal-scuttle full of coals, for the purpose, as he said, of lighting his mistress’s fire. As this motive did not seem very probable, the coals were examined, and a knife found hidden among them, with which, he afterward confessed, he intended to have murdered his mistress, provided she made any resistance to a design he had formed of robbing her of a large sum of money which he was aware she had that day received. The following case has been quoted in several medical works, at least in works written by learned doctors, and on that account I should not mention it here, but for the purpose of remarking on the extraordinary facility with which, while they do not question the fact, they dispose of the mystery:—