magnetism,' they can influence the variations of temperature--in plain
words, the weather; that by operations, akin to those ascribed to
mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, &c., but applied scientifically,
through vril conductors, they can exercise influence over minds, and
bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances
of our mystics. To all such agencies they give the common name of vril."

Zee asked me if, in my world, it was not known that all the faculties of
the mind could be quickened to a degree unknown in the waking state,
by trance or vision, in which the thoughts of one brain could be
transmitted to another, and knowledge be thus rapidly interchanged.
I replied, that there were amongst us stories told of such trance
or vision, and that I had heard much and seen something in mesmeric
clairvoyance; but that these practices had fallen much into disuse or
contempt, partly because of the gross impostures to which they had
been made subservient, and partly because, even where the effects upon
certain abnormal constitutions were genuinely produced, the effects when
fairly examined and analysed, were very unsatisfactory--not to be relied
upon for any systematic truthfulness or any practical purpose, and
rendered very mischievous to credulous persons by the superstitions
they tended to produce. Zee received my answers with much benignant
attention, and said that similar instances of abuse and credulity had
been familiar to their own scientific experience in the infancy of their
knowledge, and while the properties of vril were misapprehended, but
that she reserved further discussion on this subject till I was more
fitted to enter into it. She contented herself with adding, that it
was through the agency of vril, while I had been placed in the state
of trance, that I had been made acquainted with the rudiments of their
language; and that she and her father, who alone of the family, took
the pains to watch the experiment, had acquired a greater proportionate