for a small microscope, the wonders of which I thought might interest and
amuse Lilian, to open a drawer in which I kept the manuscript of my
cherished Physiological Work, and, in so doing, my eye fell upon the wand
which I had taken from Margrave. I had thrown it into that drawer on my
return home, after restoring Lilian to her mother's house, and, in the
anxiety which had subsequently preyed upon my mind, had almost forgotten
the strange possession I had as strangely acquired. There it now lay, the
instrument of agencies over the mechanism of nature which no doctrine
admitted by my philosophy could accept, side by side with the presumptuous
work which had analyzed the springs by which Nature is moved, and decided
the principles by which reason metes out, from the inch of its knowledge,
the plan of the Infinite Unknown.

I took up the wand and examined it curiously. It was evidently the work
of an age far remote from our own, scored over with half-obliterated
characters in some Eastern tongue, perhaps no longer extant. I found that
it was hollow within. A more accurate observation showed, in the centre
of this hollow, an exceedingly fine thread-like wire, the unattached end
of which would slightly touch the palm when the wand was taken into the
hand. Was it possible that there might be a natural and even a simple
cause for the effects which this instrument produced? Could it serve to
collect, from that great focus of animal heat and nervous energy which is
placed in the palm of the human hand, some such latent fluid as that which
Reichenbach calls the "odic," and which, according to him, "rushes through
and pervades universal Nature"? After all, why not? For how many
centuries lay unknown all the virtues of the loadstone and the amber? It
is but as yesterday that the forces of vapour have become to men genii
more powerful than those conjured up by Aladdin; that light, at a touch,
springs forth from invisible air; that thought finds a messenger swifter
than the wings of the fabled Afrite. As, thus musing, my hand closed over