EXPERIMENTS WITH LIVING HUMAN BEINGS. 755 



plates of copper or silver or gold was the result of feeble electrical cur- 

 rents excited, or of simple mechanical pressure, or of absorption, they 

 could surely have answered, to the satisfaction of scientific men, the 

 question whether it was to be explained subjectively or objectively ; 

 but this, through want of appreciation of the sources of error, or from 

 want of a formula to guide them in their elimination, they failed to do. 

 Even though it should be proved, as it may be, that some of these phe- 

 nomena observed by Burq, and Charcot, and Westphal are objective, 

 and independent of the expectation of the persons operated on, the 

 validity of this criticism is thereby not at all affected. To attempt to 

 build up a practice of metal-therapeutics on the basis of metalloscopy 

 as that claim now stands, is like putting up a house before we are sure 

 of our foundations. The first question to decide is whether metal-thera- 

 peutics is or is not really mental-therapeutics. 



In the illustrations for this essay I have chosen, by preference, the 

 experiments of scientific men of skill, honor, and distinction, and for 

 the same reason that Blair, in his work on rhetoric, refers, for examples 

 of incorrectness, inelegance, and carelessness of style, only to the writ- 

 ings of the greatest masters of style in the language : if these things 

 be done in the green trees, what shall be done in those that are utterly 

 dry ? The average scientist, the every-day physician, the followers, the 

 gleaners and popularizers of knowledge, are expected to blunder and 

 teach but half truths, if not positive error ; but if all those who should be 

 our experts fail us, where can we look for clear ideas ? It is no overplus 

 of enthusiasm, no fancy of rhetoric, to say that if these six sources of 

 error and the true methods of providing for them had been mastered 

 half a century ago, the history of scientific experimenting during that 

 time would have been radically diflPerent from what it now is. 



On this subject no nation can throw stones at another ; in all the 

 great centers of modern civilization the strongest leaders of science 

 and scientific thought have been and are constantly demonstrating their 

 non-expertness in the art of experimenting with living human beings ; 

 the history of science, or the demonstrably true, and the history of de- 

 lusions, or the demonstrably false, run in the same channels ; but in the 

 minds of the French there appears to be some psychological peculiarity 

 that, while it urges them to undertake, at the same time unfits them 

 to succeed in researches of this character, their very genius for sci- 

 ence, as it relates to inanimate nature and the lower forms of life, pre- 

 disposing them to all error when dealing with living human creatures ; 

 hence the paradox of history that France is at once the home of 

 science and the home of delusions. Now, for almost a century, the 

 ablest philosophers and experimenters of France have been wrest- 

 ling with the problem how to experiment with living human beings ; 

 from the first committee of the French Academy on mesmerism, 

 through Perkinism and Burqism, down to the very latest bulletin of 

 Charcot on metalloscopy, it is one uniform, unbroken record of per- 



