till they are absolutely irremediable and must ultimately terminate in dissolution, Bo vice, considered as a growing and deadly disease of the mental constitution, may end in its total derangement and final destruction." And does not development depend on the existence of certain conditions in which the germ is developed? It is true that great mystery hangs upon the future. It is not for us to discern the laws of development inscribed upon "what a man soweth." No scrutiny of sense will detect the huge oak in the little crownless acorn; yet who doubts the result if it lives, and who talks of development if it fail of the conditions of life? We revert, then, to our position that there may be an ultimate dissolution of the spiritual as there now is of the natural consciousness, and that there will be a resurrection from the second death as certainly as there is a resurrection from the first. When the vessel was marred in the hands of the potter, so as to be "without remedy," then, says the prophet, "he returned and made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it." So the breaking to pieces of the former vessel is followed by making another out of the broken materials. Thus the dead shall rise.

By what means and in what state this second resurrection may be supposed to be effected; whether it takes place now or shall be deferred until a great crisis in the world's history, are questions we cannot enter into, but may refer the inquirer for the latest, and, perhaps, fullest investigation of the subject which we have met with to a work which we hear will now shortly be published, entitled Primeval Man: His Birth, Fall, and Restitution. Meanwhile we are content to oppose an erroneous dogma with the statement of a belief, which, however mysterious, at least contributes in our judgment to reconcile the requirements of reason and revelation with each other, and both with the mercies of God. For although much has been offered in vindication of the nature and the permission of future suffering, we see no other evolution than this of the still more irresistible belief that in the counsels of Him, to whom a thousand years are less than yesterday, the misery which sin has introduced into the universe and which to our vision seems so endless, is not to be considered even as a grain of sand on the shores of future ages, but rather as something which shall be converted, as Jung Stilling surmises, into the groundwork of a sublimer happiness and a closer conjunction with God than could have been attained, had man never fallen, and never thereby provoked the descent of Deity.-W. W. F.

EPITAPH ON LORD WESTBURY.

RICHARD BARON WESTBURY,
Lord High Chancellor of England,
He was an eminent Statesman,
An energetic and successful Christian,
And a still more eminent and successful Judge.
During his three years' tenure of office
He abolished

The time-honored institution of the Insolvents' Court,
The ancient mode of conveying land,
And

The Eternity of Punishment.
Towards the close of his earthly career,
In the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council,
He dismissed Hell with costs,

And took away from Orthodox Members of the
Church of England,

Their last hope of Everlasting Damnation.-Spectator.

Correspondence.

Cambridge, March 22nd, 1864. SIR,-There is one class of spiritual facts of more frequent occurrence and much more generally admitted than any othernamely, the appearance of dying persons to their distant friends. Mr. Dale Owen, in his Footfalls on the Boundary of another World (Book I, chap. 1), speaking of the Cambridge Ghost Club, the account of which was furnished to him "by the son of a British peer, himself one of the leading members,"* says,"The same gentleman informed me that the researches of the Society had resulted in a conviction, shared, he believed, by all its members, that there is sufficient testimony for the appearance, about the time of death or after it, of the apparitions of deceased persons; while, in regard to other classes of apparitions, the evidence, so far as obtained, was deemed too slight to prove their reality." Similar remarks will be found in most other books which treat of these things. Several such "apparitions" have been described to me by personal friends of my own, by whom they have been seen. Indeed, on one occasion, when a friend of mine was relating a story of this sort in the presence of Dr. Elliotson (the well-known physiologist), the doctor remarked,"Oh! such stories are as common as blackberries;" and proceeded to tell some similar ones amongst his acquaintance. But the great Mesmerist insisted on explaining all these phenomena as the effect of a Mesmeric action by the mind of the dying person on distant friends-a theory which he has also put forward in the Zoist. In reply to this explanation, my friend (the late J. C. Robertson, the founder and editor of the Mechanics' Magazine) asked Dr. Elliotson, how, in accordance with this theory, he would explain the following fact which occurred to himself and a brother. The two brothers (both very young at the time, I forget their exact ages) were in bed together at their father's house, when they both saw the apparition of a lady to whom their father (a widower) was engaged to be married. She died suddenly that same night. The father was away from home, and not with the boys. In this case it seems as if the dying lady had been desirous of appearing to the father, and had come to his usual dwelling in the expectation of seeing him; but was disappointed, finding only his sons instead. "Oh!" said Dr. E., "the

*I presume it will be no great violation of secrecy to say that the gentleman here referred to is the Hon. A. H. Gordon, now Governor of New Brunswick.

ghost made a mistake," and so the story passed off with a joke as usual. But there is something more than matter for jesting in such a narrative. If, as the doctor said "the ghost made a mistake," it would seem as if the spirit did actually come to the house in search of the person whom it wished to see-and not as if the vision were the mere effect of a Mesmeric "rapport;" for it is not likely that the dying lady was thinking of the two boys. It so happened that Mr. Robertson himself died a few months after the above dialogue, and the brother referred to in it was with me in the same mourning coach at the funeral, and confirmed the story as told by his deceased brother. The elder brother was, I believe, more alarmed at the apparition than the younger.

It is very desirable that all those who know of similar cases should publish them-authenticated by their names, and when permitted, by the names of all the persons concerned. Especially valuable would be cases where the dying person is seen by strangers, or by some one of whom it cannot be supposed that the dying person is thinking at the time-such a case, for example, as that of the officer killed in the Crimea, and who appeared not only to his wife in Cambridge, but to another lady in London (see the account in Owen's Footfalls, and Howitt's History of the Supernatural).

The two following are of the more ordinary kind, but both told to me by intimate personal friends of my own:-A lady in Cambridge, whilst lying awake in bed, in the early dawn, was terribly alarmed by seeing a man who drew aside the bed curtains and stared at her. She awoke her husband, who searched the room in vain. An uncle, very much attached to her, and who had been thinking much of her, died that same night. A merchant in Newcastle-on-Tyne was walking on the quay, in the busiest part of the day, when he suddenly said to his friends, "Why! there is my friend So-and-so," and left them to go and speak to this unexpected visitor, but could not find him. The person thus seen died at that same time, at a distant place (Liverpool, I believe). Whilst one of these stories was being told, another gentleman related the following:-His father was captain of a ship. One day, on the voyage from Newfoundland, the mate came in from the bowsprit looking very pale, and on being questioned, said he had just seen his brother, whom he had left in Jersey. They noted the event, and, on their return to Jersey, found that the brother had died at the time he was thus seen.

I have sent you a translation of a paper in a German journal, to which reference has often been made by writers on this subject. If the facts in it related by Herr Wesermann are true, they are certainly most wonderful, and bear very strongly on the theory of mesmeric will-influence. Being, however, isolated, and not

well authenticated, they are scarcely worth much until confirmed by other and numerous similar cases.

I am, yours &c.,

ALFRED W. HOBSON.

TRANSLATION

Of an Extract from an Article by H. M. Wesermann, in "Archiv für den Thierischen Magnetisimus," Band VI., Stück 2, page 136-139 (dated Dusseldorf, 15th June, 1819, in a Letter to the Editor of the " Archiv").

I HAVE myself made experiments on Far-seeing (das Fernsehen) in natural sleep, concerning which I have, from various works, collected a theory which I submit to your judgment. I represent to myself, in fact, the universe as an aggregate of invisible forces which are capable of acting according to their qualities on the human soul. The air, for example, is capable of conveying the sound of distant music with a velocity of 1,026 to 1,085 feet in a second through the ear to the soul. The finer ether conveys the forms of distant objects by means of the rays of light through my eye to the soul, and with a velocity of 43,000 miles in a second. Whereupon I ground the conclusion that the still finer magnetic fire (as Mesmer calls it) must be able to convey my thought-pictures (Gedanken-bilder) to a distant sleeping friend through the nerves, on which I have made the following confirmative experiments:

First Experiment at a Distance of Five Miles.-To my friend, the Hofkammerrath G, whom I had neither seen, written, or spoken to for thirteen years. I tried to make known my visit by presenting my form (bild) to him whilst asleep, through the force of my will; and when I unexpectedly went to him on the following evening, he evinced his astonishment at having seen me in a dream on the preceding night.

W

Second Experiment at a Distance of Three Miles.-Madame was in her sleep to hear a conversation, between me and two other persons, on a certain secret, and when I visited her on the third day she told me all that had been spoken, and shewed her astonishment at this remarkable dream.

Third Experiment at a Distance of One Mile.-An aged person in G was to see in a dream the funeral procession of my deceased friend S and when I visited her on the next day, her first words were that she had in her sleep seen a funeral procession, and on enquiry had learned that I was the corpse. Here then was a slight error.

Fourth Experiment at a Distance of One-eighth of a Mile.Herr Doctor B, desired to receive a visit to convince him, whereupon I represented to him a nocturnal street-brawl, which, to his great astonishment, he also saw in a dream.

Fifth Experiment at a Distance of Nine Miles.-To Lieut. Nthere was to appear in a dream by night, at eleven o'clock, a lady deceased five years, and who was to incite him to a good action. Herr N, however, contrary to expectation, had not gone to sleep at eleven o'clock, but was conversing with his friend S on the French campaign. Suddenly the door of the chamber opens; the lady, dressed in white, with black kerchief and bare head, walks in, salutes S thrice with her hand in a friendly way, turns then to N, to whom she nods, and then returns through the door. Both follow quickly, call the sentinel at the entrance, but all had vanished, and nothing to be found. Some months afterwards, Herr S-informed me by letter that the chamber door used to creak when being opened, but did not do so when the lady opened it, whence it is to be inferred that the opening of the door was only a dream-picture (traumbild) like all the rest of the apparition.

My friend, Privy Councillor H, and Doctor W and Doctor W, have made similar experiments with success; others have not succeeded. Such extraordinary apparitions to persons whilst awake seem explicable by the statements of the clairvoyants of Messrs. Ghert and Bährens, according to which a stream of light proceeds from the magnetizer and leads to the distant friend when the former directs his thoughts strongly and without distraction upon him. If this explanation is correct, we have the explanation of the visions in Jung's Geisterkunde, (Jung Stilling's book on apparitions) as for instance the "White Lady" and other similar appearances, or that they are dream-pictures caused by others. Dark and incomprehensible to me, nevertheless, remains the gift of divination, where the seers perceive the future in shadowy forms, since here there is no one present to excite the soul of these persons.

The mathematicians have, by persevering investigation, discovered the formulæ by which eclipses of the sun and moon can be foretold many years in advance. If, now, any such order existed in the affairs of mankind in all ages, so that, for example, after the completion of a revolution of our solar system round the great central sun, there was a recurrence of former events, the problem would be easy as soon as the requisite formula had been found.