ARTIFICIAL SOMNAMBULISM. 199 



While carrying out this system, I noticed that gradually the 

 will acquired power over muscles which before I had been 

 quite unable to move. I may say, indeed, that every set of 

 muscles recognised by anatomists, except those belonging 

 to internal organs, gradually came under the control of my 

 will/ Here I interrupted, asking (not by any means as 

 doubting his veracity, for I did not) : ' Can you do what 

 Dundreary said he thought some fellow might be able to 

 do ? can you waggle your left ear ? ' ' Why, certainly,' he 

 replied \ and turning the left side of his head towards me, 

 he moved his left ear about ; not, it is true, waggling it, 

 but drawing it up and down in a singular way, which was, he 

 said, the only exercise he ever gave it. He said, on this, 

 that there are many other muscles over which the will has 

 ordinarily no control, but may be made to obtain control ; 

 and forthwith, drawing the cloth of his trousers rather tight 

 round the right thigh (so that the movement he was about 

 to show might be discernible) he made in succession the 

 three muscles of the front and inner side of the thigh rise 

 about half an inch along some nine or ten inches of their 

 length. Now, though these muscles are among those 

 which are governed by the will, for they are used in a 

 variety of movements, yet not one in ten thousand, perhaps 

 in a million, can move them in the way described. 



How far A.'s system of exciting the muscles individually 

 as well as in groups may have operated in improving his 

 health, as he supposed, I am not now inquiring. What I 

 wish specially to notice is the influence which the will may 

 be made to obtain over muscles ordinarily beyond its con- 

 trol. It may be that under the exceptional influence of the 

 imagination, in the hypnotic condition, . the will obtains a 

 similar control for a while over even those parts of the 

 nervous system which appertain to the so-called involuntary 

 processes. In other words, the case I have cited may be 

 regarded as occupying a sort of middle position between 

 ordinary cases of muscular action and those perplexing cases 

 in which the hypnotic subject seems able to influence pulsa- 



