THE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT. 521 



formed, by ordering him to do so when still somnambulistic. I asked him what 

 he had been doing. He said he had been crowing. I asked him why he 

 crowed. He said he did not know, he crowed because he conld not help it. I 

 asked him what he had been thinking of, and his answer was, ' Je pensais a mes 

 poules" ("I was thinking of my hens"). 



This, however, appeared to be as far as we have yet got in this 

 new excursion into psychical research of animals ; it is not very 

 instructive or edifying. So far as all these persons went they 

 must be pronounced impudent impostors, and it is difficult to con- 

 ceive how they can have succeeded in duping serious people, or 

 how they can be permitted to have carried on the fraud for so 

 many years. So also with the imaginary effects of the various 

 medicinal substances in sealed tubes. I repeated this perform- 

 ance on every one of these five subjects of M. Luys, on whom he 

 has for years been lecturing, whom he has photographed, and of 

 whose good faith he gives so many assurances. We made notes 

 (sometimes written by myself, sometimes by Dr. Sajous, some- 

 times by M. Cremiere) of the results. The subjects were never 

 once right, even by accident. When Mervel at the hospital sup- 

 posed the tube to contain mercury although it really contained 

 diabetic sugar, he suffered agonies of the kind which he supposed 

 mercury to produce. He had gnawing pains ; his limbs were be- 

 ing eaten away, and he was in dire agony from the worst effects 

 which a prolonged mercurial course used often to produce, and of 

 which the repute is still a tradition in the hospitals. Madame Vix, 

 at my rooms, had another opinion of the effect of mercury, gath- 

 ered apparently from its use in infantile ailments ; for she was a 

 mother. When she thought the tube contained mercury she be- 

 gan to suffer acute pains " colique d'enfants," she said ; and to 

 stop the comedy I had to apply to her neck what was supposed to 

 be a tube of cinnamon water, but which was really charged with 

 bisulphide of mercury. This quickly calmed her pains, which 

 were beginning to be indecorous. With Mervel at the hospital, 

 when I had him to myself and hypnotized by the ward attendant, 

 all the effects supposed to be due to valerian were produced with 

 burned sugar. He was duly and quickly transformed into a cat, 

 and the whole drama was enacted in the ward, but this time under 

 the influence of a tube of sugar- water, with vivid feline effects. 

 Strychnine, of which I was warned that the effects were most dan- 

 gerous, for, as Dr. Luys observed to me, " You might kill a patient 

 with it through incautiously applying the tube," I used repeatedly 

 and most incautiously without producing any effects, for I was 

 careful never to mention its name. I may emphasize that on this 

 occasion it was not I who hypnotized Mervel, but a person who 

 was well accustomed to do so. 



Leaving now the detail of the various scenes of this tragi- 



