ANIMAL MAGNETISM.
“Charlatan is rising in public favour, and has many backers who book him to win.”—Sporting Intelligence.
OF all the signs of the times—considering them literally as signs, and the public literally as “a public”—there are none more remarkable than the Hahnemann’s Head,—the Crown and Compasses, devoted to Gall and Spurzheim’s entire,—and the Cock and Bull, that hangs out at the House of Call for Animal Magnetizers. The last concern, especially—a daring, glaring, flaring, gin-palace-like establishment—is a moral phenomenon.
[Pg 453]
 That a tap dispensing a raw, heady, very unrectified article, should obtain any custom whatever, in a reputed genteel and well-lighted neighbourhood, seems quite impossible; yet such is the incomprehensible fact;—respectable parties, scientific men, and even physicians, in good practice in all other respects, have notoriously frequented the bar, from which they have issued again, walking all sorts of ways at once, or more frequently falling asleep on the steps, but still talking such “rambling skimble-skamble stuff” as would naturally be suggested by the incoherent visions of a drunken man. Such exhibitions, however are comparatively rare in London to their occurrence in Paris, which city has always taken the lead of our own capital in matters of novelty. It is asserted by a good authority, that at a French concern, in the same line, no
[Pg 454]
 less than seventy-eight “medical men, and sixty-three other very intelligent individuals,” became thoroughly muzzy and mystified, and so completely lost all “clairvoyance” of their own, that they applied to an individual to read a book and a letter to them; to tell them the hour on their own watches; to mention the pips on the cards; and by way of putting the state of their “intuitive foresight” beyond question, they actually appealed to the backsight of a man who was sound asleep! A bout on so large a scale has............