Inaugural Physico-Medical Dissertation on the Magnetism of the Macrocosm and Microcosm

men, or foreign species, whether brute, mineral, or vegetable.

§. 4. Here we are overwhelmed by a huge cloud of Magnetisms. If you consider man in relation to another, whether established in the same sphere of vitality—for example, a fetus still residing in its mother’s womb—or in a different and proper sphere of vitality, and thus living separately, very many magnetic operations occur. To the former class belong congenital or maternal marks, which are the work of the mother’s imagination, variously sealing the fetus. Helmont has a singular example regarding Magnetic virtue the power of attraction: a pregnant woman had a stronger appetite for cherries, and after rubbing her forehead, she imprinted the trace of that same cherry on the fetus; this was not an idle image, but every year, according to the tenor of the trees, it was accustomed to turn green, whiten, yellow, and finally redden. You will find various forms of such marks in the Centuries of Miscellaneous Works by Camerarius, the Chronology of Bucholzer, and Sennert’s Concordance of Chemistry and Galen with Aristotle and others. Regarding the influx and action of spirits, see the Famous Chemical College of B. Cramer, Professor of Erfurt. This was the magnetic power of the mother exerting itself upon the embryo or the fetus not yet perfect. Who is unaware that, according to many Physiologists, the contact of the male semen in the very act of conjugal union is required not so much as a corporal contact as a virtual one to impregnate the woman’s ova? Not to mention what we have received through the undoubted faith of Practitioners, that there have been women who, on account of the narrowness of the vagina, could scarcely urinate, much less admit the husband’s penis deeply, yet even though the semen was ejaculated before the gate of the vagina, they were nonetheless rendered fertile and impregnated. These were by no means for any other purpose than as an irrefutable document of the contact of male semen, at least virtual, namely that the plastic spirit of the semen had most rapidly penetrated to the uterus and the ova by magnetic exertion. The Magnetisms of parents toward their children in the forming of their characters are also sufficiently evident, according to that Horatian verse: