explaining how an enthusiast may cure some diseases by touching or stroking the part diseased, yet it would be no true miracle,.. and the perverse ingenuity with which he supports a true opinion by false reasoning, is very characteristic of this curious writer. "There may be very well, (he says) a sanative and healing contagion, as well as morbid and venomous. And the spirits of melancholy men being more massy and ponderous, when they are so highly refined and actuated by a more than ordinary heat and vigour of the body, may prove a very powerful elixir, Nature having outdone the usual pretences of chemistry in this case."
Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, Sect. 58.
"This very place," he adds in the Scholia to this Treatise, "I shewed to that excellent person, Mr. Boyle, at London, as I was talking with him in a Bookseller's shop, being asked by him what I thought of the cures of Valentine Gretrakes, with the fame of which all
