Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/429

 416 E. GUENEY: at unusual times, or for an unusual length of time. Thus, one child, aged 3J, on returning home, slept for 17 hours consecutively, and even then did not wake spontaneously. Another, aged 1 year, had been crying day and night for 4 weeks, with snatches of sleep of only 5 or 6 minutes, owing to obstinate colic and constipation. " Daring one of her short sleeps, and consequently without her consciousness, I prolonged this condition, keeping my hands on her for 20 minutes, till she showed signs of waking. From that moment the crying stopped, as if by magic ; she slept during a great part of the night, and when she was brought next day, she was quiet, and the constipation had been relieved." I have not space for further citations ; but, as to the results, it will be noted that it at least sufficed to bring a man whom none that know him will accuse of pretension or exaggera- tion, and who had long pursued the path of orthodoxy, to a candid confession of the belief that " the organic changes produced must have been due to a transmitted nervous influence". He considers the alternative hypothesis, that the effects were due to the heat of his hands ; but not only had the children been kept warm and were pro- bably as warm as his hands when he touched them but, as he remarks, they " had often remained for long hours in their mothers' hands, without any amelioration". Thus the results, if they prove specific influence at all, would go to prove an influence which is specific not only in the sense of being peculiar to living organisms, but in the further sense of appertaining to particular individuals. To pass now to experiments with older persons, where contact must be avoided. These could hardly ever take the ordinary form of entrancement ; for it would be difficult so to arrange conditions that passes should be continuously made near a person's face without his knowledge and con- sent. The waking from trance can, no doubt, be carried out in this manner ; and I have myself on a good many occa- sions seen a ' subject ' awakened by gentle upward passes, not near enough to his face or head, one would have thought, to produce any sensible current of air. 1 But by far the most 1 Berger and Gscheidlen have described the transformation of natural into hypnotic sleep by the holding the hand near the sleeper's head. Gscheidlen professes to have succeeded in 8 cases out of 15 the test of the change of state being that the sleeper no longer reacted to the tickling of the soles of his feet (see the Deutsche Medicinishe Wochenschrift for 1880, pp. 92-3, and Malten's Der magnetische Schlaf, p. 13). Berger, however, says that warm metal plates produced the same effect one of the startling statements, too numerous in the history of hypnotism, which seem never to