oe 
1 Z il 
anf 
140 . BAILLY. 
himself to this point of view, a few traits would have 
sufficed. 
Plutarch, for example, would have come to the aid of 
the reporter. He would have showed him Pyrrhus cur- 
ing complaints of the spleen, by means of frictions made 
with the great toe of his right foot. Without giving one’s 
self up to a wild spirit of interpretation, we might be 
permitted to see in that fact the germ of animal magnet- 
ism. I admit that one circumstance would have rather 
unsettled the savant: this was the white cock that the 
King of Macedon sacrificed to the gods before beginning 
these frictions. 
Vespasian, in his turn, might have figured among the 
predecessors of Mesmer, in consequence of the extra- 
ordinary cures that he effected in Egypt by the action of 
his foot. It is true that the pretended cure of an old 
blindness, only by the aid of a little of that emperor's 
saliva, would have thrown some doubt on the veracity of 
Suetonius. 
Homer and Achilles are not too far back but we might 
have invoked their names. Joachim Camerarius, indeed, 
asserted having seen, on a very ancient copy of the Iliad, 
some verses that the copyists sacrificed because they did 
not understand them, and in which the poet alluded, not 
to the heel of Achilles (its celebrity has been well estab- 
lished these three thousand years,) but to the medical 
properties possessed by the great toe of that same hero’s 
right foot. 
What I regret most is, the chapter in which Bailly 
might have related how certain adepts of Mesmer’s had 
the hardihood to magnetize the moon, so as, on a given 
day, to make all the astronomers devoted to observing 
that body fall into a syncope; a perturbation, by the way, 
