150 NOTICES OF THE MEETINGS [March 12, 
and, however’strange or incongruous their combinations or se- 
quences may appear, we are never surprised at them, because we 
have lost the power of referring to our ordinary experience. It is 
well known that the course of ordinary dreams is often determined 
by impressions received through the organs of sense, although the 
individual may not be conscious of them as such ; and those who are 
prone to reverie are well aware that the direction of their thoughts 
depends in many instances, not merely upon the previously existing 
associations between their ideas, but upon the excitement of new 
ideas by external impressions. 
There is one phenomenon of the ‘ biological’ state, which has been 
considered pre-eminently to indicate the power of the operator’s will 
over his subject; namely, the induction of sleep, and its spontaneous 
determination at a given time previously ordained, or by the sound 
of the operator’s voice, and that only. It is well known that the 
expectation of sleep is one of the most powerful means of inducing it, 
especially when combined with the withdrawal of the mind from 
everything else which could keep its attention awake; both these 
conditions are united in an eminent degree in the state of the biolo- 
gized subject, whose mind has been possessed with the conviction 
that sleep is about to supervene, and is closed to every source of 
distraction. Nor need the waking at a given time, or upon a given 
sound (and upon that only), be accounted at all more strange ; for 
it is a matter of familiar experience, that this is often determined, in 
the case of an ordinary sleeper, by the impression under which he 
passes into unconsciousness; the fixed intention to awake at a cer- 
tain hour being productive of the exact consequence; and the habit 
of attention to a particular sound, as that of a clock, bell, voice, &c., 
causing the sleeper to awake upon the slightest provocation from it, 
although his slumbers are not broken by noises of far greater in~- 
tensity. 
Thus, then, however strange the phenomena of the ‘ biological * 
state may at first sight appear, there is not one of them, which, when 
closely scrutinized, is not found to be essentially conformable to facts 
whose genuineness every physiologist and psychologist is ready to 
admit. And the chief marvel is, that a state in which these pheno- 
mena are so easily and constantly producible, should be capable of 
being induced by so simple a process as that of gazing for a time at 
‘a small fixed object at arm’s length from the eyes.* 
It is not, however, in any large proportion of individuals, that this 
state can be induced; probably not more than one in twenty, or 
at most one in twelve. Males appear equally susceptible of it with 
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* The “ Electro. Biologists,” as they term themselves, at first maintained that 
a wonderful virtue resided in the little disk of copper with a zinc centre, to 
which they directed the gaze of their ‘subjects.’ It is now universally admitted, 
however, that any object which serves as a point d’apput for the fixed gaze, is 
equally efficacious. 
