Blair Collection > History of the Celtic language

of carbonic acid gas, as affecting animal life, was
anathematized by more than one German univer-
sity as hostile to religion, and tending to atheism.
Mr Coleridge tells the story thus: "Three or four
students, at the university of Jena, in the attempt
to raise a spirit for the discovery of a supposed
hidden treasure, were strangled or poisoned by the
fumes of the charcoal they had been burning, in a
close garden-house of a vineyard near Jena, while
employed in their magic fumigations and charms.
One only was restored to life; and from his account
of the noises and spectres in his ears and eyes, as
he was losing his senses, it was taken for granted
that the bad spirit had destroyed them. Frederic
Hoffman admitted that it was a very bad spirit
that had tempted them — the spirit of avarice and
folly ; and that a very noxious spirit — gas or geist
— was the immediate cause of their death. But
he contended that this latter spirit was the spirit of
charcoal, which would have produced the same
effect had the young men been chaunting psalms,
instead of incantations, and acquitted the devil of
all direct concern in the business. The theological
faculty took the alarm — even physicians pretended
to be horror-stricken at Hoffman's audacity. The
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