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Hardcover. Zustand: Good. Zustand des Schutzumschlags: No Dust Jacket. First Edition. First volume (Volume XXIII, January to June 1844) is worn with front board detached. Foxing. Second volume is July, August, September 1844 issues of Volume XXIV only. Very good condition, lacking contents leaf to July issue. Rubbing to joints and edges of boards.; Complete series of three articles on Mesmerism. The 3 articles are titled: "Mesmerism" (Vol. XXIII, pp. 37-53); "Mesmerism (Second Article) (Vol, XXIII, pp. 286-301); and "A Few More Words About Mesmerism. - The State of Sleep-Walking" (Vol. XXIV, pp. 78-90). All three articles are credited to Irys Herfner. The first two articles are in the complete Volume XXIII - January to June 1844 of "The Dublin University Magazine". [4], 768 pages. Page dimensions: 217 x134mm. Front board detached, spine worn with tears and a 25mm chip at head. The third article is in a volume which its titled "Volume XXIV" on the spine, but in fact is only the July, August, and September issues of "The Dublin University Magazine", rather than the complete Volume XXIV, which has 6 issues from July to December 1844. 378 pages. Lacking the Contents leaf to the July 1844 issue. Subject matter of the articles on Mesmerism also include clairvoyance, oracles, power of imagination; witchcraft; divining rods; therapeutic dreams. Ferris begins his series by a discussion of physical magnetism, and its study in the 17th century by Paracelsists and Van Helmont. He describes Van Helmonts' perception of his own soul in 1633 after experimenting with taking aconite. Ferris discusses Anton Friedrich Mesmer and the case of Fraulein Paradies. Mesmer believed he had cured the vision of Paradies. She was able to name to colour of any object presented to her, but only while Mesmer was in the room. While some suggested that Mesmer was communicating the colour to her by deception, a "preconcerted system of signals between her and him" (page 44), Ferris suggests that there was no intent to deceive, but that Fraulein Paradies had developed clairvoyance as a result of a "rapport magnetique" generated by Mesmer's treatment. Ferris refers to and quotes from another work on mesmerism, Mr Lang of Glasgow's "Mesmerism; its history, phenomena and practice" (1843), in which Lang "places before us the melancholy and humiliating record of the reception which physical truth, in most of her avatars and discoveries of herself to men, has met with at the hands of her chosen priests. Galileo greeted with the epithets of 'plagiarist! liar! imposter! heretic!" - Volume XXIII, page 53. Ferris writes about the difficulty of separating facts from theory, something today termed the "theory dependence of observation" in philosophy of science. "Not to theorize is not to look, but passively to suffer the shape of things to flit over the incognizant sense" - Volume XXIII, page 287. On the evil eye: "Rousseau assures us that he killed four toads in Egypt by what Mr. Tappertit would call 'eyeing them over' [. . .] but an enlighted French one [i.e. a French toad] [. . .] returned his look with such malign effect, that he swooned on the spot." - page 297. Ferris considers mesmeric powers may be behind witchcraft - "Little doubt can be entertained that the greater part, if not the whole of the bewildering effects which that era set down to the account of necromantic or demoniac agencies, had their true ground in the zoo-magnetic principle." - Vol. XXIII, page 299. The third article concludes with a quotation from Schubert - "Just that which in the world of visible things is the outermost and most remote, is in our own being the innermost and nearest. The all-containing, all-pervading, of the same nature with that power which contains, order, and moves the worlds of heaven, is in us the self-conscious spirit. [. . .]" - Vol. XXIV, p. 90. [Reference: Neil #007, 008, 009 (Neil, Terri, "Henry Ferris: A Bibliography" in Showers, Brian J. (editor) "The Green Book - Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature - Issue 8 - Samhain 2016" Dublin: The Swan River Press, 2016].