real, forced him to attribute to himself a superhuman power over the body also. [40] _Actes de la Société helvét. des sc. nat._, August, 1877. [Sidenote: Usually explicable by the science of nervous phenomena.] The science of the nervous system, which dates almost entirely from our days, may be taken as a perpetual running commentary on the history of miracles. Perhaps a full quarter of the marvellous facts observed and revered by humanity fall into place within the limits of this new science. A physician, or observer, in the midst of his subjects is like a prophet; those who surround him are incessantly obliged to recognize in him an occult power, which he himself does not understand; physician and patient, observer and observed, live equally in the realm of the extraordinary. The facts of partial insensibility, of catalepsy followed by a reawakening like a rising from the dead, of mental suggestion taking place even at a distance, all these facts, which are well known, and are each day becoming more and more explicable, are even for us at the present moment on the confines of the miraculous; they are detaching themselves, under our very eyes, from the sphere of religion, and falling within the compass of science. The observer who notices for the first time that he can transmit an almost compulsive command by a look, by a pressure of the hand, and even, it appears nowadays, by a simple tension of his will, must experience a species of surprise, even of fright, of almost religious disquietude at finding himself armed with such a power. He must begin to understand that the mythical and mystical interpretation of such facts is an affair of delicate discrimination, that lay beyond the stretch of primitive intelligence. [Sidenote: Often by less recondite knowledge.]