THE CURIOSITIES OF CREDULITY. 



309 



Ainsi, Messieurs, Georget est mort plein de foi 

 dans le magnetisme ; son ouvrage reste, et l'au- 

 teur n'est pas la pour effacer les erreurs qu'il 

 contient." Tlie circumstance referred to by Dr. 

 Bousquet was a death-bed confession made by a 

 female hospital patient, one of the principal sub- 

 jects of MM. Rostan and Georget's experiments 

 on clairvoyance; who declared that she and a 

 confederate (who occupied the next bed) used to 

 spend many delicious hours of their nights in 

 chuckling over the deceits they had put on the 

 doctors, and in contriving new ones for the next 

 day. The effect of this disclosure upon the mind 

 of M. Rostan (which I learned at the time through 

 the private channel already referred to) is shown 

 by the fact that when a second edition of the 

 " Dietionnaire de Medecine " came out in 1838, he 

 withdrew the article he had contributed to the 

 first, this being replaced by one from the pen of 

 M. Calmeil (a physician of the highest repute in 

 the same line), which went as strongly against 

 the pretensions of animal magnetism as Rostan's 

 article of 1825 had gone in their favor. 



At a subsequent sitting of the Academy, an 

 earnest appeal was made to it by a young mag- 

 netizer, M. Berna, to enter anew upon a system- 

 atic investigation of the whole subject. " Ma 

 croyance au magnetisme," he urged, " n'est point 

 le fruit de l'enthousiasme ou d'un examen super- 

 ficiel, mais de plusieurs annees d'experiences et 

 de meditation. . . . Je propose de faire voir, sur 

 des personnes que j'ai actuellement a ma dispo- 

 sition, des faits concluants en faveur du magne- 

 tisme." Moved by the obvious sincerity of this 

 appeal, and unwilling to hold back from inquir- 

 ing into the facts which M. Berna professed him- 

 self fully prepared to substantiate, the Academy 

 appointed a second commission, which included 

 MM. Roux, Bouillaud, Hippolyte Cloquet, Pelle- 

 tier, and other distinguished members of its body, 

 with M. Dubois (d'Araiens) as its reporter. This 

 commission reported, six months afterward, that 

 M. Berna had utterly failed to prove his case ; 

 the only fait concluant demonstrated being that 

 he had been victimized by cunning cheats. 

 Against this conclusion a protest was made by 

 M. Kusson, the reporter of the first commission ; 

 but the report of M. Dubois was nevertheless 

 almost unanimously adopted by the Academy. It 

 was to meet the argument of M. Husson— that, 

 although M. Berna's clairvoyantes had failed, other 

 magnetizers might bring forward more " lucid " 

 subjects — that M. Burdin offered his prize ; and 

 a third commisssion was then appointed, for the 

 special purpose of investigating the claims of 



clairvoyance. This third commission included, 

 with M. Husson, the reporter of the first, and M. 

 Dubois, the reporter of the second, such acknowl- 

 edged leaders of the medical profession as MM. 

 Chomel, Louis, Double, and Morcau. It contin- 

 ued open to the investigation of all claims to the 

 Burdin prize for a period of three years. It de- 

 tected and exposed the trickery of the claimants 

 who ventured to present themselves. And when, 

 in 1840, it presented its report, the Academy was 

 so completely satisfied that the members of its 

 first commission had been (like the Salemites of 

 1692) " sadly deluded and mistaken," that it ar- 

 rived at the determination thenceforth to regard 

 all communications on the subject of animal mag- 

 netism as non avenues, having no more claims on 

 its attention than claims to the discovery of 

 " perpetual motion," or the " quadrature of the 

 circle," would have upon that of the Academy of 

 Sciences. 



Now, I ask what would be thought of the 

 fairness of a stanch Scripturalist who should now 

 quote, as valid testimony to the universality of 

 the Noachian Deluge, the "Reliquiae Diluvianae" 

 of Dr. Buckland, whose fundamental doctrine was 

 subsequently retracted by its author in his Bridg- 

 water Treatise ; or should accuse a scientific op- 

 ponent either of culpable ignorance, or of inten- 

 tional sttppressio veri, in making no mention of a 

 report presented in favor of the same doctrine to 

 a scientific society, which not only never adopted 

 it, but, in the course of a few years, passed upon 

 it the strongest possible sentence of condemna- 

 tion ? Yet this is exactly what Mr. Wallace 

 has done in reviewing my " Lectures " in Mr. 

 Crookes's journal, accusing me of " ignoring ev- 

 ery particle of evidence which is too powerful to 

 be explained away," and citing, as conspicuous 

 examples of one-sidedness, my silence as to M. 

 Rostan's article and M. Hussou's report. If time 

 had permitted, I should have most gladly ad- 

 duced in my " Lectures " these very testimonies 

 as conspicuous examples of the extent to which 

 the most able but " prepossessed " men may be 

 led away by cunning cheats — M. Rostan by his 

 own confession, and the members of the first 

 commission on the almost unanimous verdict of 

 the French Academy of Medicine. 



That animal magnetism is now, as in 1840, 

 regarded by the highly-trained medical intelli- 

 gence of France as a " dead letter," only worthy 

 of attention as a "curiosity of history," which 

 "points a moral" in regard to other like de- 

 mands on human credulity, may be judged from 

 the manner in which it is treated in one of the 



