EXPERIMENTS ON HYPNOTISM. 211 



societies, as mutual trust and confidence advance, they are liable to 

 be rudely checked from time to time as the rewards of the liar and 

 thief temptingly increase. The very perfection of mechanical appli- 

 ances is used by the burglar and counterfeiter, and only a high de- 

 gree of educated ingenuity and a world-wide mercantile good faith 

 could have made such a fiend as Thomassen possible. The invention 

 of new machinery, the manufacture of new chemicals, the extensions 

 of mining, and the commingling of increased travel, in their accidents 

 and sometimes in their baneful results in common pursuit, render the 

 tasks of physician and surgeon more difficult than ever before. The 

 complications of modern life are so great and varied, that the moral 

 laws do not possess the direct and simple force they had of old ; in the 

 suro-e and vortex of to-day it takes a keen intellect to separate right 

 from wrong, and many err because their consciences are not reinforced 

 by education for the new exigencies. 



Evolution is underlaid, as is all change, by the greater law of the 

 persistence of force, ever holding the even balance through all com- 

 plexity, maintaining throughout all a just compensation. Every new 

 faculty and enjoyment is earned by its equivalent of work, trouble, 

 or ill; with every addition to power comes an addition to wants, to 

 labor, and the possibilities of pain. As the stores of the mind increase 

 so also do ideals craving satisfaction become higher and wider: ever 

 " on the isthmus of a middle state," man is at once a record of the 

 past and a prophecy of the future; limited by his inheritance to defi- 

 nite acquirement, he yet aspires, by nascent impulses, for such better 

 things as only his posterity can ever possess. 



-- 



EXPERIMENTS ON HYPNOTISM. 



By FRANKLIN CHASE CLARKE, M. D. 



SOME time ago my attention was called to two articles on "Hyp- 

 notism in Animals," in the columns of The Popular Science 

 Monthly, 1 in which I became very deeply interested. 



For the sake of those who may have forgotten what the author, 

 Prof. Czermak, said in regard to these very curious phenomena as 

 observed in fowls, I will briefly describe his mode of proceeding, and 

 afterward give the results of my own experiments. 



And, first, of the crawfish experiment. If a crawfish is held firmly 

 in one hand, while with the other " passes" are made along the back 

 of the animal from head to lower extremity, the animal will become 

 so quieted as to allow itself to be placed in any position whatever, even 

 the most unnatural, without once stirring. Among people generally 



1 September and November, 1873. 



