The attention of scientific men and governments has recently been directed to what are now called “The Accursed Sciences,” under whose action certain crimes have been committed from “suggestion,” the hand which executed being only that of an irresponsible automaton, whose memory preserves no traces of it. The French Academy has just been debating the question--how far a hypnotized subject from a mere victim can become a regular tool of crime.--Lucifer, October 1887.

“Merck’s Bulletin,” New York medical journal, in an editorial entitled Modern Witchcraft, December, 1892, relates some astonishing experiments recently made at the Hopital de la Charitè, Paris, in which the power to “exteriorize sensibility” has been discovered, reproducible at will; suggestion through means of simulated pinching producing suffering; photographs sensitive to their originals even having produced. Thus modern science stamps with truthfulness the power asserted as pertaining to black magicians, of causing suffering or death through means of a waxen image of a person. “The Accursed Sciences,” although brought to the bar of modern investigating knowledge, seem not yet to have yielded the secrets of the law under which they are rendered possible.