Mr. Winslow, once become a mesmerizer, very soon left Dr. P—— far behind. In pushing forward his investigations, he found that he could not only throw persons, not indeed every one, but one in twenty-five or thirty, into the mesmeric sleep, render them insensible, dead as it were to all the world except himself, but that he could develop in them, or superinduce upon them, a marvellous physical strength. I saw him place a weak and sickly boy in a chair on the platform of his lecture room, and so nerve his arm that not two of the strongest men could move it. He would, by his mental operation, so nail the chair to the floor that no force applied to it could raise it. He would throw the boy by the same operation upon the floor, render his whole body, neck, legs, arms, fingers, and toes, rigid, and stiff as a crowbar; then suddenly relax all his limbs, and render him as flexible as a reed—now fill him with rage, make him rave furiously, rush through the audience as one possessed, overthrowing every thing and every one in his way—now recall him, soothe his rage, make him cry and weep as if afflicted with the deepest and most inconsolable grief, and now dry at once his tears, and break forth into the wildest and maddest joy. These were singular phenomena. Whence this apparently superhuman strength? That certainly was no effect of complicity, for the boy exhibited a physical strength far surpassing that of both mesmerizer and mesmerized in their normal state. It could not be the effect of imagination. “For how,” said Mr. Winslow, “can you explain by imagination the effect produced on material objects? You see that I can magnetize a glass of water or a bunch of flowers. Do you pretend that these are endowed with imagination; are not only sensitive, but also intellectual, and even volitive? Have the most common material objects sense, intellect, and will? Imagination, highly excited, may indeed develop and concentrate the strength which one has, but how impart a strength which one has not?” “I have been studying these wonderful phenomena,” said Mr. Increase Mather Cotton, a rigid puritan minister of high standing, and who had accompanied me to see Mr. Winslow’s experiments, “and I think I see in them the works of the devil.” “Why, sir,” replied Mr. Winslow, “I do these things myself. My patients move and act, are paralyzed, laugh, cry, weep, rage, foam, run, fly, fight, or make love, at my will. Do you think I am the devil?” “Be not too confident,” replied Mr. Cotton. “You may yet find that, if not the devil yourself, that it is a devil, and a very base and wicked devil, that moves you, and uses you as the instrument of his malice.” “I have no belief,” answered Mr. Winslow, “in devils or demons, as separate and intelligent beings.”