^64 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



explanations. With such then animal-magnetism has taken its 

 origin. According to them some mysterious, imponderable, yet 

 potent fluid passes from person to person : the manipulator of spirits 

 has, doubtless at first honestly, and then afterward with conscious 

 deception, thought his power over the passive subject of his will to 

 be due to some peculiar magnetic virtue in his own constitution. 

 In such persons has the hydra-headed monster of Spiritualism been 

 ..conceived and reared ; and only recently have scientific men been 

 found brave enough to face credulity and ignorant prejudice, and deal 

 with certain undoubted facts, endeavouring to explain them upon the 

 true basis of physical and psychical science. We shall not trouble 

 , ourselves with the empiric consultations and diagnostications of 

 Teste and Deleuze, finding thereby diseases that have never had an ex- 

 istence ; nor how Yasseur- Lombard cured cancer by magnetism, nor 

 yet of how diseased plants have been stimulated by its mysterious 

 power to a more vigorous growth ; but we shall endeavour, in at 

 most a very imperfect way, to study some of the phenomena of this 

 neurosis, produced, it may be, artificially or by pathological causes. 



Defining then our subject, we would say that there are certain 

 persons, mostly females, of such constitution, that they, by certain 

 manipulations, simple or more or less complicated, may be brought 

 into such a neurotic condition as that they may be made to pass into 

 . a deep sleep in which they may be kept at will for an almost indefinite 

 number of hours. Such then is the apparently simple fact of hypno- 

 , tism ; but this apparently simple fact, I think we shall see as we 

 proceed, will become one both of very great interest and of much 

 difficulty as regards its explanation. 



And first it becomes necessary for us to consider whether in this 

 condition of hypnotism the physical system is in exactly the same 

 condition as in natural sleep. As we all know the factors which 

 enter into the causation of the unconscious state known as sleep are 

 so varied that it is most natural that many explanations have 

 been given of the state. Sbmmer, as we know, supported by Pet- 

 tenkbfer and others, believed that sleep means exhaustion of the 

 oxygen of the blood and tissues, which has taken place during the 

 , day, and that, when this is again stored up at night in sufficient 

 .quantity waking follows. While in all probability the fact of there 

 being a -greater consumption of oxygen during the day than at night 

 is probably true, yet we are hardly prepared to accept the theory of 



