Abstract of 'Researches on magnetism and on certain allied subjects', including a supposed new imponderable / By Baron von Reichenbach. Translated and abridged from the German by William Gregory.

  • Reichenbach, Karl, Freiherr von, 1788-1869.
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Abstract of 'Researches on magnetism and on certain allied subjects', including a supposed new imponderable / By Baron von Reichenbach. Translated and abridged from the German by William Gregory. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    This has now been done ; and while thus giving to his coun¬ trymen the means of becoming acquainted with these very remarkable researches, the translator has to apologise to the reader for the very rough unpolished form in which they ap¬ pear, and which is the result of the necessity under which he laboured of abridging and condensing the writings of an¬ other. In these circumstances, he was compelled to renounce all pretensions to elegance or even neatness of style, and to hope that he might, notwithstanding, succeed in making the facts and the conclusions deduced from them intelligible to the reader. To the author he has also to apologise for the mutilation which he has been compelled to inflict on that author’s literary offspring ; which, however, was necessary, in order to give the translation a better chance of being read than the original, the length of which has been the chief ob¬ stacle to its being better known. Such is the history of the present publication. It is, and professes to be, nothing more than a detail of the author’s experiments, and a statement of the conclusions deduced from them. Its only claims to attention are the care and caution with which the experiments were made, their truly scientific character, and the minute accuracy with which they are reported, taken in connection with the fact, that these experiments throw much light on several very obscure departments of science. The first of these is the so-called Animal Magnetism. The author has demonstrated, that magnets act on the human body, especially in certain conditions ; and thus restores to the statements of the early magnetisers on this point the credit of which they had been unjustly deprived. The author’s experiments are the more valuable, because, as far as the present memoir extends, he never experimented with persons in what is called the mesmeric state. But he goes farther ; for he demonstrates the existence, in magnets, of two forces ; one which attracts iron and affects the needle, and one which acts on the nervous system, and which he has found, unmixed, in crystals. This new force he is disposed to view as the true agent in Animal Magnetism.