202 THE WONDERFUL CENTURY. CHAP. xvn. 



Academic de Medecine, or confound it with the second 

 commission, which gave a purely negative report on one 

 limited phase of the phenomena! 



Thus, the late Dr. W. B. Carpenter, in his volume on 

 " Mesmerism, Spiritualism, etc., Historically and Scien- 

 ficially Considered" (Longmans, 1877), writes as follows: 



" It was in France that the pretensions of mesmeric 

 clairvoyance were first advanced; and it was by the 

 French Academy of Medicine, in which the mesmeric 

 state had been previously discussed with reference to the 

 performance of surgical operations, that this new and 

 more extraordinary claim was first carefully sifted, in 

 consequence of the offer made in 1837 by M. Burdin 

 (himself a member of that Academy) of a prize of 3000 

 francs to anyone who should be found capable of read- 

 ing through opaque substances." 



Neither here, nor in any part of his volume, does Dr. 

 Carpenter show any knowledge of the existence of the 

 Commission of 1825-31, which really "first carefully 

 sifted " the varied phenomena of Animal Magnetism, 

 including numerous cases of clairvoyance, and decided 

 that they were genuine. 



In the last edition of Chambers' " Encyclopaedia," a 

 publication remarkable for the great ability of its con- 

 tributors and the impartial treatment of disputed ques- 

 tions, we find in the article " Animal Magnetism " the 

 following passage: "Despite the unfavorable report of 

 the French Commission of 1785, as well as of a later one 

 in 1831, and other subsequent exposures "... indi- 

 cating that the writer was unacquainted with the favor- 

 able report of 1831, and confused it with the negative 

 report of 1837-40. And this ignorance is confirmed by 



