Genre:

Introduction; Extract, Anecdote

Subjects:

Magic, Physiology, Miracle, Providence

    Relates an anecdote, extracted from a 'respectable Publication', reporting the case of a seventeenth-century French ambassador, who twice experienced 'a violent hemorrhage [sic] at the nose' at the approach of a shoemaker who was his unsuspected nephew. In the original context, this is adduced as an instance of 'the sympathetic affinity of individuals'. The writer of the introduction allows that there 'may possibly exist some sort of occult sympathies in nature' and is not inclined 'boldly to discredit every fact, for which science, at present, is unable to account'. Suggests that it might even have been a miraculous intervention.