Genre:

News-Commentary, Drollery

Subjects:

Mesmerism, Animal Magnetism, Crime, Quackery, Commerce

    Responding to an advertisement in a Birmingham paper from a female 'Clairvoyante' and 'Herbalist', asks whether clairvoyants can see through walls in houses of correction where they have been imprisoned. Goes on to discuss the experiences of a 'professor of Somnambulism', Adolphe Didier, who offers his 'oracular consultations' to the fashionable readers of the Morning Post, and who claimed to have predicted the Derby winner during a mesmeric trance. Given that he was forced to publish a book on animal magnetism (Didier 1856), Punch suspects that such powers benefit all but the 'owner'.