So saying, he took up his hat and cane, and, slightly bowing, left my room without hearing a word in reply, or giving me a parting greeting. When he was gone, I laughed to myself at his solemn admonition, and renewed my resolution that he should suffer for the manner in which he alluded to my dear Priscilla. He should know whether she was a Moabitish woman or not. Warn me! Pray what had I done? Where was the harm? Was it wrong to investigate the principles of nature, to learn what nature really is, and to call her forces into play, providing they were not applied to a bad end? Could it be a good spirit that would debar us from acquiring science, or a bad spirit that would bid us inquire, to learn our strength, and to use it? Would it be no slight service to relieve the more mysterious parts of science from the reproaches cast upon them? Has it not been computed that more than a million of persons alone suffered as sorcerers and sorceresses, or for dealing with the devil, in the sixteenth century and seventeenth alone? What injury has not been done to genuine science by the absurd legislation against magic, sorcery, and the so called black arts generally. No man could rise above the vulgar herd, and produce some ingenious piece of mechanism, but the rabble accused him of magic, and it was lucky if he escaped a criminal prosecution and conviction before the courts of justice. Was not that noble heroine, Joan of Arc, who saved France from becoming an English province, burnt as a witch? Was not Friar Bacon, the father of modern science, and the forerunner of his namesake of Verulam, accused of magic, imprisoned, and thus scientific discoveries and useful inventions postponed for centuries? Had not hundreds of old women, who had nothing of sorcery about them but their poverty, weakness, and imbecility, been dragged before the courts, and hung or burnt as witches? What more lamentable page in our own American history than that of Salem witchcraft? Is it nothing to disabuse the world, to save so many innocent victims, remove so great a hinderance to science and heroic deeds, by bringing the class of facts, superstitiously interpreted, within the bounds of nature and legitimate science? Then, again, what may not be finally obtained for the human race? Are the resources of nature exhausted? They sought once the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, the fountain of youth; who knows but these may one day, and that not far distant, be found, if not in the shape sought, in others, more simple and convenient?