Researches on magnetism, electricity, heat, light, crystallization, and chemical attraction : in their relations to the vital force / By Karl, Baron von Reichenbach. Tr. and ed. at the express desire of the author, with a preface, notes, and appendix, by William Gregory. With three plates and twenty-three wood-cuts. Parts I and II, including the second edition of the first part, cor. and improved.

  • Reichenbach, Karl, Freiherr von, 1788-1869.
Date:
1850
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Researches on magnetism, electricity, heat, light, crystallization, and chemical attraction : in their relations to the vital force / By Karl, Baron von Reichenbach. Tr. and ed. at the express desire of the author, with a preface, notes, and appendix, by William Gregory. With three plates and twenty-three wood-cuts. Parts I and II, including the second edition of the first part, cor. and improved. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    137/536 (page 83)
    all of them successively, and which, while it lay on a table, they felt and tried with the fingers of both hands, yielded, with all, the same results. All the patients pointed out the powerful principal axis, with its poles, the one feebler than the other ; and also weaker secondary axes with their poles, in exactly the same lines and points. It often happened that the most powerful principal axis was not the longest, but a shorter one ; this was often the case with gypsum; and the perfect agree- ment of so many observers, unknown to each other, in these statements, was the best guarantee for the reality and accu- racy of their observations. These observations may be easily controlled elsewhere, because, in populous cities, sensitive ner- vous patients are at all times to be found. But even healthy persons, such as M. STUDER, could often, without difficulty, detect the poles of crystals by the finger. Now these poles and axes invariably coincided with the crystallographic poles and axes, and it became, therefore, more than probable, that the crystalline force has a share in the formation of crystals, if it do not alone determine that process. It may possibly be, to crystals, what the vital force is to organised tissues. But I shall not here venture to indulge in conjectures, but adhere to that which, as a matter of ascertained fact, bears on the subject ; namely, that the crystalline force exists in crystals in a polar form, and is found simultaneously in several axes in the same crystal, but in various degrees of intensity. 85. Now I find analogous relations in animal hfe itself. We assume, in man, a principal axis, from above to below, and we regard the brain and the genital organs as the poles of that axis. But if I may draw a conclusion from the above recorded facts of what is called Animal Magnetism, this is not a principal, but only a secondary axis. It has been shewn, in the first place, that patients sensitive to the action of the magnet, cannot endure especially that position in which the length of the body lies in a magnetic parallel, or from west to east. In this position, the body is magnetically differentiated (under the influence of terrestrial magnetism) in its breadth ; a state which it seems unable to endure. Something analo- gous is known with respect to chills. When a chill comes