PROFESSOR MITCHELL.

THE PLANETS.

THE worlds of light that nightly illume the firmament of earth are not mere spheres of uninhabitable matter, nor are they simply appendages to earth, -glittering ornaments to attract the eye of man,— but vast systems of suns and tributary planets, with worlds whose products and inhabitants far exceed in organized development those of this little planet Earth, whose astronomers are just beginning to realize the capacities of the worlds revealed through their telescopes.

Many of these worlds have existed centuries prior to the formation of the planet you inhabit, and their inhabitants have attained a degree of civilization which only time can give to you.

The intellectual development of many of the dwellers of these planets is as far superior to your highest state of culture as your condition is in advance of the first stages of barbarism.

Men of earth erect temples to their God—their Deity -- which to them are imposing and grand; but compared to the magnificent structures that rear their towers high into space from those glittering points that attract your eye, they are poor and insignificant.

Yet, as being the highest expression of your intellectual unfolding, we look upon them with admiration, even as you regard the rude attempts of the Egyptians and the earlier races in their grotesquely formed images and temples.

The inhabitants of some of the planets attain a life many times the duration of man's. One of the causes of this prolonged existence is the great age and refinement of the planet. While it is undergoing change, and preparing the vegetable for the animal, and the animal for the mental creation, the conditions that ensue are insalubrious, and conducive to disease and death. But when the perfection of the natural world is attained when it becomes, so to say, spiritualized, and its grosser elements are absorbed then the human being can live on its surface and develop his faculties from century to century.

The thoughtful reader will perceive from this statement that the spirits who have inhabited these superior planets must have attained a far greater perfection than those who have inhabited your earth, and the spiritual existence, or heaven, to which such beings migrate, is in advance of the heavens in which the dwellers of earth are born.

The spiritual heavens correspond to the firmament of the natural world, and thus there are myriads of systems of spiritual worlds.

The residents of these planets visit earth as elder brothers who take by the hand the little faltering infants. But intercourse with the earth is more difficult for them than for your own native spirits, from the fact that the magnetic atmosphere does not assimi

late with them. From the earth's spirit world, scientific minds of rare development only have been able to visit the spirit homes of those planetary inhabit

ants.

What I have said can give but a faint idea of the population of the unseen worlds. As a drop of water which is clear and unoccupied to the eye, when viewed through the microscope is found to be peopled with living creations, so the worlds that overspread the heavens are peopled in every part that the eye can cover.

Man is indeed nothing; and yet he is the wholea mere speck, a point, and yet God himself in the aggregate.

DR. JOHN W. FRANCIS.

THE INFLUENCE OF MIND UPON MATTER, AND THE CAUSES OF INSANITY AND THE VARIOUS DISEASES WHICH AFFLICT HUMANITY AT THE PRESENT DAY.

THE rude nations of the earth believed that disease was the result of evil spiritual agencies, and the untutored savage, without the aid of books or any of the advantages which the learned physician possesses of studying the human system, arrived at the conclusion that disease was inflicted by living, unseen individualities.

Science has discarded that idea. It has dissected the human body, and, finding the result of the diseases, has assumed to have found the cause; assumed that it is mere bodily disarrangement. Yet any intelligent physician will tell you that in his own experience he has witnessed the effect of mind upon the body; that he can give a bread pill to a patient, informing him that it is a purgative, and it will act in that manner; that a certain powder will create nausea or a burning sensation, and it will produce those results when the powder itself is harmless.

As the body, if permitted to decay, comes to be infested with vermin, so the spirit, if allowed to remain idle and inactive, will become infested by

spiritual vermin which will taint and destroy it; and the savage idea that disease is caused by spiritual agency is correct.

If an individual permit any one idea to obtain predominance, and he dwell upon that idea to the exclusion of other thoughts, he will attract spirits who fill the air—not organized spiritual beings who inhabit the spirit world, but half-organized beings (polypus) who live in this atmosphere and were originated from the brains and the physical organisms of the inhabitants of the earth; these beings, finding his mind concentrated or magnetized to a point, will effect an entrance. Suppose, for instance the person centres his mind upon the loss of a friend or of money: this concentration becomes a magnet, which, like the rays of sunlight acting upon a portion of vegetation, produces decomposition upon which spirit vermin may feed. So by dwelling too continuously upon one thought, certain faculties of the mind become excited by constant action, while others become paralyzed and the result is insanity.

Now spiritualists, or believers in spirit intercourse, should be the most healthy persons in the community, for they understand, or should understand, the laws of psychology which teach that constant dwelling upon one thought will bring spirits of like character who will intensify that thought, and they also know that they have but to use their will and the whole magnetic relations will change and a new influence will be brought to bear.

Tell a man he has heart disease, make him believe it, and his heart will beat like a sledge-hammer.