Dr. Sigault, an eminent physician of Paris, professed to be an adept in the art of Mesmer. Being at a great assembly one day, he caused it to be announced that he could magnetize. The voice and serious air he assumed had a very sensible effect upon a lady present, although she endeavored at first to conceal the fact. But having carried his hand to the region of the heart, he found it palpitating. She soon experienced difficulty in respiration. The muscles of her face were affected with convulsive twitches; her eyes rolled; she shortly fell down in a fainting fit, vomited her dinner, and experienced incredible weakness and languor. This seemed to corroborate the remarks of Burton, in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_, where he says, "If, by some soothsayer, wise man, fortune teller, or physician, men be told they shall have such a disease, they will so seriously apprehend it that they will instantly labor of it--a thing familiar in China, (saith Riccius, the Jesuit.) If they be told they shall be sick on such a day, when that day comes they will surely be sick, and will be so terribly affected that sometimes they die upon it." A late English paper states that a young woman, named Winfield, who had been on a visit to Derby, returned home to Radborn, taking a little dog with her by a string. On arriving there, she informed her friends she had seen a gypsy on the road, who told her, that if she led her dog by the string into the house, she would soon be a corpse. Singular to relate, the young woman expired on the following morning! It was thought she died from the effect of imagination, aided by a debilitated constitution. A missionary among the New Zealanders says, "There is a class of people in New Zealand, called by the natives _Areekee_, and whom we very improperly call _Priests_. These men pretend to have intercourse with departed spirits, by which they are able to kill, by incantation, any person on whom their anger may fall. And it is a fact, that numbers fall a prey to their confidence in the efficacy of the curses of these men, and pine under the influence of despair, and die."