THE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT. 211 



his mistake and saw what he ought to have seen. He was quite 

 unable to distinguish an inert piece of iron from a true magnet, 

 and unless he were guided by words let fall by the bystanders, or 

 by the adoption of a systematic proceeding to which he was accus- 

 tomed, he was quite at sea. Clarice and Jeanne, in their lucid 

 somnambulistic state, never knew whether the current was on or 

 off ; unless they had a clew to the answers they ought to give, 

 they were ludicrously wrong. They saw enormous flames issuing 

 from the powerful magnet which I used. When I told the assist- 

 ant to .put on the current, acting on my previous instructions, he 

 always did exactly the opposite of what I said, and they always 

 fell into the trap. The culminating absurdity of this phase of 

 the performance was the famous show for which this clinique has 

 become famous, known as the magnetic skullcap, with its thera- 

 peutic and physical influences. " In this magnetic circlet," said 

 Dr. Luys (speaking in the presence of his somnambulistic patient, 

 who was supposed not to hear), " are stored up the thoughts and 

 mental characteristics of an individual who suffered from melan- 

 cholia and hallucinations of persecution. I will now put it on 

 Mervel's head, and you will see what follows " ; whereupon Mervel 

 showed dramatic signs of the hallucination of persecution, suffer- 

 ing apparently great pain of mind and body. Possibly it was too 

 cleverly acted to be wholly simulation, but it afforded a good ex- 

 ample of the mixture of hysterical readiness to accept any sugges- 

 tion with unlimited powers of deception ; for this took place at 

 the same sitting, and in the same state in which he pretended to 

 see red flames and blue flames at random, accordingly as he sup- 

 posed the magnet, or the photographs which I showed him, or the 

 prints, or the pins, to be of the north pole or of the south pole. I 

 repeated the experiment, always with the like results. Dr. Olivier, 

 the editor of the Revue des Sciences Physiques, writes to me that 

 the exposure was complete. 



There was no correspondence between the phenomena manifested by the hyp- 

 notized person and the production of the current of magnetization, etc. You 

 repeated the experiments of Dr. Luys and those of M. de Rochas, avoiding all 

 suggestion, whether involuntary or unconscious, capable of vitiating the results, 

 and you were careful to conceal from the subjects of experiment the moment at 

 which the opening or the closing of the current of the magnet took place. 



At any rate, therefore, we may exclude from the positive re- 

 sults which I attained in the presence of many witnesses the pos- 

 sibility of the electrical or magnetic current having any real rela- 

 tion whatever to the phenomena shown, and, as far as the utmost 

 care could go, we may exclude also the influence of suggestion in 

 any occult sense. Where the subjects thought they knew what 

 was expected of them in their state of lucid somnambulism, they 

 did it or saw it, whether I operated, or Dr. Luys, or his ward 



