at pleasure fancy every cloud in the sky to represent a man or a demon. “The wish to strike a fatal blow at the monster superstition, which, at no distant period, poured out upon European society from a similar source, such inexpressible misery, when, in trials for witchcraft, not hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings perished miserably, either on the scaffold, at the stake, or by the effects of torture—this desire induced the author to try the experiment of bringing, if possible, a highly-sensitive patient by night to a churchyard. It appeared possible that such a person might see, over graves in which mouldering bodies lie, something similar to that which Billing had seen. Mdlle. Reichel had the courage, rare in her sex, to gratify this wish of the author. On two very dark nights she allowed herself to be taken from the castle of Reisenberg, where she was living with the author’s family, to the neighboring churchyard of Grunzing. The result justified his anticipation in the most beautiful manner. She very soon saw a light, and observed on one of the graves, along its length, a delicate, breathing flame: she also saw the same thing, only weaker on the second grave. But she saw neither witches nor ghosts; she described the fiery appearances as a shining vapor, one to two spans high, extending as far as the grave, and floating near its surface. Some time afterward she was taken to two large cemeteries near Vienna, where several burials occur daily, and graves lie about by thousands. Here she saw numerous graves provided with similar lights. Wherever she looked, she saw luminous masses scattered about. But this appearance was most vivid over the newest graves, while in the oldest it could not be perceived. She described the appearance less as a clear flame than as a dense, vaporous mass of fire, intermediate between fog and flame. On many graves the flames were four feet high, so that when she stood on them, it surrounded her up to the neck. If she thrust her hand into it, it was like putting it into a dense, fiery cloud. She betrayed no uneasiness, because she had all her life been accustomed to such emanations, and had seen the same, in the author’s experiments, often produced by natural causes. “Many ghost-stories will now find their natural explanation. We can also see that it was not altogether erroneous, when old women declared that all had not the gift to see the departed wandering about their graves; for it must have always been the sensitive alone who were able to perceive the light given out by the chemical action going on in the corpse. The author has thus, he hopes, succeeded in tearing down one of the most impenetrable barriers erected by dark ignorance and superstitious folly against the progress of natural truth.”