‘64 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 
explanations. With such then animal-magnetism has taken its 
origin. According to them some mysterious, imponderable, yet 
potent fluid passes from person to person: the manipulator of spirits 
has, doubtless at first honestly, and then afterward with conscious 
deception, thought his power over the passive subject of his will to 
be due to some peculiar magnetic virtue in his own constitution. 
In such persons has the hydra-headed monster of Spiritualism been 
conceived and reared; and only recently have scientific men been 
found brave enough to face credulity and ignorant prejudice, and deal 
with certain undoubted facts, endeavouring to explain them upon the 
true basis of physical and psychical science. We shall not trouble 
ourselves with the empiric consultations and diagnostications of 
Teste and Deleuze, finding thereby diseases that have never had an ex- 
istence ; nor how Vasseur-Lombard cured cancer by magnetism, nor 
yet of how diseased plants have been stimulated by its mysterious 
power to a more vigorous growth ; but we shall endeavour, in at 
most a very imperfect way, to study some of the phenomena of this 
neurosis, produced, it may be, artificially or by pathological causes. 
Defining then our subject, we would say that there are certain 
persons, mostly females, of such constitution, that they, by certain 
manipulations, simple or more or less complicated, may be brought 
into such a neurotic condition as that they may be made to pass into 
a deep sleep in which they may be kept at will for an almost indefinite 
number of hours. Such then is the apparently simple fact of hypno- 
tism ; but this apparently simple fact, I think we shall see as we 
proceed, will become one both of very great interest and of much 
difficulty as regards its explanation. 
And first it becomes necessary for us to consider whether in this 
-condition of hypnotism the physical system is in exactly the same 
condition as in natural sleep. As we all know the factors which 
enter into the causation of the unconscious state known as sleep are 
so varied that it is most natural that many explanations have 
been given of the state. Sdémmer, as we know, supported by Pet- 
tenkéfer and others, believed that sleep means exhaustion of the 
oxygen of the blood and tissues, which has taken place during the 
day, and that, when this is again stored up at night in sufficient 
quantity waking follows. While in all probability the fact of there 
being a greater consumption of oxygen during the day than at night 
is probably true, yet we are hardly prepared to accept the theory of 
