aes | 
142 BAILLY. 
Servan’s pamphlet seemed at the time the anchor of 
salvation for the Mesmerists. The adepts still borrow 
from it their principal arguments. Let us see, then, 
whether it has really shaken Bailly’s report. 
From the very commencing lines, the celebrated Attor- 
ney-General puts the question in terms deficient in exact- 
ness. If we believe him, the commissioners were called 
to establish a parallel between magnetism and medicine ; 
“they were to weigh on both sides the errors and the 
dangers ; to indicate with wise discernment what it would 
be desirable to preserve, and what to retrench, in the two 
sciences.” Thus, according to Servan, the sanative art 
altogether would have been questioned, and the impar- 
tiality of the physicians might appear suspicious. The 
clever magistrate took care not to forget, on such an 
occasion, the eternal maxim, no one can be both judge 
and client. Physicians, then, ought to have been ex- 
cepted. 
There then follows a legitimate homage to the non- 
graduated academicians, members of the commission: 
“ Before Franklin and Bailly,” says the author, “ every 
knee must bend. ‘The one has invented much, the other 
has discovered much; Franklin belongs to the two 
worlds, and all ages seem to belong to Bailly.” But 
arming himself afterwards with more cleverness than 
uprightness, with these words of the reporter, “ The 
commissioners, especially the doctors, made an infinity of 
experiments,” he insinuates under every form that the 
commissioners accepted of a very passive line of conduct. 
Thus, putting aside the most positive declarations, pre- 
tending even to forget the name, the titles of the reporter, 
Servan no longer sees before him but one class of adver- 
saries, regent doctors of the Faculty of Paris, and then 
