assured, and money came in, so to speak, by handfuls, so that all
financial troubles were altogether at an end.

From 1839 till 1844 she was so terribly out of health that no treatment
produced any effect, until someone suggested that mesmerism should be
tried, and this succeeded so well that she recovered a certain amount of
strength and was able to go on with her writing. Nevertheless, that it did
not wholly restore her health is evident from the fact that in 1855, when
Newman was writing to her brother, he mentions her "formidable fainting
fits" and daily pains in the head. "Her letter tells me," he says, "how
very bad she is, that every day she feels shot in the head"; but he goes
on to say that he does not despair of her better health because (as indeed
her numerous books testify), her "body is so subject to her mind." It is,
I think, necessary to remember that in 1844, when Miss Martineau tried
mesmerism as a cure for her continued ill-health, mesmerism was
practically taking its first steps in the English medical world. This
science of healing, which began to be recognized in England about the
middle of the eighteenth century, through the medium of the afterwards
discredited Mesmer, has "in its day played many parts" and had more names
than one. In the first instance it was called mesmerism, then animal
magnetism, while to-day, when it has forced its way through incredulity,
distrust, and opposition of all sorts, and come to the front in very
truth, it faces us as a power which bids fair to be more and more with us
as time goes on under the name of Hypnotism.

Perhaps few people remember the name of the man who really brought animal
magnetism into prominence in the middle of the last century. Yet James
Braid, the Scotch surgeon, who then lived at Manchester, and pursued with
untiring thoroughness and perseverance his studies in the then little-
known science, was really the shoulder that pushed hypnotism into our