140 BA1LLY. 



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, 



