62 1 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



endeavor to demonstrate it to you. Yet, I am obliged to say express- 

 ly beforehand that I cannot promise you this experiment will succeed, 

 in consequence of this large assembly, the light, and the room, which, 

 in spite of the quiet and attention, is not wholly free from noise. I 

 have never performed this experiment under such circumstances, and 

 therefore cannot say whether any disturbing influence would affect 

 my hen. 



I must call to your remembrance, for my own safety as a careful 

 and circumspect experimenter, that we are making a new experiment, 

 or, in fact, an old one under somewhat altered circumstances. There- 

 fore we must be fully prepared to make a new discovery, which will 

 probably undeceive us in no agreeable manner, if it robs us of the 

 pleasure of confirming, now and here, the wonderful accounts relative 

 to the condition in which a timid hen can be placed after such appar- 

 ently insipid and senseless preparations. 



(The lecturer caused one of his assistants to bring him a hen and 

 hold it fast upon the table. This was done after much resistance and 

 many cries from the frightened bird ; then with his left hand he held 

 the head and neck of the hen upon the table, and with his right hand 

 drew a chalk-line, beginning from the end of the beak, on the flat sur- 

 face, which was of a dark color. Left entirely free, the hen, though 

 breathing heavily, remained entirely quiet upon the table; then, with- 

 out moving, it allowed itself to be placed on its back, and remained in 

 this unnatural position until the close of the lecture. It only awoke 

 when the audience began to leave.) 



When I performed this experiment for the first time and with the 

 same result as you now see, I was for the moment dumb with as- 

 tonishment, for the hen not only remained motionless in its unnatural 

 and forced position, but did not make the slightest attempt to fly 

 away or to move in any manner whatever when I endeavored to 

 startle it. It was clear the hen had lost the entire normal functional 

 capacities of its nervous system under the apparently indifferent and 

 useless arrangement of the experiment, and had been placed in this 

 remarkable condition as though by magic. This state is characterized 

 by a greater or a less suspension of its intelligence or will. 



But nil admirari is the first maxim of the moderate investigator 

 of nature. We must now ascertain the actual connection of these 

 phenomena, so as not to stand still at an " event viewed unequally," 

 like old Athanasius Kircher, the celebrated savant and Jesuit from 

 Fulda, who affirmed this mysterious result in one of his works which 

 appeared in Rome about 164G, " Ars magna lucis et umbrw" as a 

 positive corroboration of the immense imagination of hens. Kircher 

 performed the experiment (which he called " expert mentum mirabile 

 de imaginatione gallium" and illustrated excellently with a fine wood- 

 cut) in the following way : 



He first tied the hen's feet together with a narrow ribbon and laid 



