= ™ i ey er Pe eh ee 
pene be Pe oe eee 
REPORT ON ANIMAL MAGNETISM. 13% 
while he was embracing another tree, very far from the 
former. 
Deslon selected, in the treatment of poor people, two 
women who had rendered themselves remarkable by their 
sensitiveness around the famous rod, and took them to 
Passy. These women fell into convulsions whenever 
they thought themselves mesmerized, although they were 
not. At Lavoisier’s, the celebrated experiment of the 
cup gave analogous results. Some plain water engen- 
dered convulsions occasionally, when magnetized water 
did not. 
We must really renounce the use of our reason, not to 
perceive a proof in this collection of experiments, so 
well arranged that imagination alone can produce all the 
phenomena observed around the mesmeric rod, and that 
mesmeric proceedings, cleared from the delusions of im- 
agination, are absolutely without effect. The commis- 
sioners, however, recommence the examination on these 
last grounds, multiply the trials, adopt all possible pre- 
cautions, and give to their conclusions the evidence of 
mathematical demonstrations. They establish, finally and 
experimentally, that the action of the imagination can 
both occasion the crises to cease, and can engender their 
occurrence. 
Foreseeing that people with an inert or idle mind 
would be astonished at the important part assigned to the 
imagination by the commissioners’ experiments in the 
production of mesmeric phenomena, Bailly instanced: 
sudden affection disturbing the digestive organs; grief 
giving the jaundice; the fear of fire restoring the use of 
their legs to paralytic patients ; earnest attention stopping 
the hiccough; fright blanching people’s hair in an in- 
stant, &e. . 
