REPORT ON ANIMAL MAGNETISM. 151 



The Doubts of the Provincial man were destined only for 

 tin- oilier class. 



It was also to these light and laughing souls that Ser- 

 van exclusively addressed himself some time after, if it 

 be true that the Queries of the young Doctor JRhubarbini 

 de Purgandis were written by him. 



Rhubarbini de Purgandis sets to work manfully. In 

 his opinion the report by Franklin, by Lavoisier, by 

 Bailly, is, in the scientific life of those learned men, what 

 the Monades were for Leibnitz, the Whirlwinds for Des- 

 cartes, the Commentary on the Apocalypse for Newton. 

 These examples may enable us to judge of the rest, and 

 render all farther refutation unnecessary. 



Bailly's report destroyed root and branch the ideas, the 

 systems, the practices of Mesmer and of his adepts. Let 

 us add sincerely that we have no right to appeal to him 

 in regard to modern somnambulism. The greater por- 

 tion of the phenomena now grouped around that name 

 were neither known nor announced in 1783. A magne- 

 tizer certainly says the most improbable thing in the 

 world, when he affirms that a given individual in the 

 state of somnambulism can see every thing in the most 

 profound darkness, that he can read through a wall, and 

 even without the help of his eyes. But the improbability 

 of these announcements does not result from the cele- 

 brated report, for Bailly does not mention such marvels, 

 neither in praise nor dispraise ; he does not say one word 

 about them. The physicist, the doctor, the merely curi- 

 ous man who gives himself up to experiments in som- 

 nambulism, who thinks he must examine whether, in 

 certain states of nervous excitement, some individuals 

 are really endowed with extraordinary faculties ; with 

 the faculty, for example, of reading with their stomach, 



