Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/399

Rh and the professional somnambulists offer as a spectacle to the credulity of the public. If they had observed for themselves, if they had handled with their own hands and seen with their own eyes the phenomena of which they deny the existence, I do not doubt that they would have had an entirely different opinion. Is it possible to suppose that all the somnambulists that have appeared during the last hundred years would have feigned the same symptoms just to conform themselves to the fancies of the little peasant Victor, the first case of the Marquis de Puységur? How, by what strange divination, can they all exhibit the same signs of the same nervous affection? Would it not be a really marvelous fact if a deception carried on for a hundred years through all Europe should everywhere and always present the same features, and if all the physicians, all the men of science who had devoted themselves to the study of it, should have become victims to the same unexplainable imposture?

Somnambulism must, then, be regarded as a veritable disease, the symptoms of which are as well described as those of hysteria and epilepsy. The only remarkable and obscure side of the study of it is that the nervous affection can be induced by exterior manœuvres, the method of the action of which escapes us. Our ignorance of the cause of the phenomenon furnishes us no reason for denying its existence. Hereafter, possibly in the course of a few years, we may arrive at an exact acquaintance, not with the symptoms, which are quite well known now, but with the physiological causes of somnambulism. We have reason to hope that the empirical processes which are at present employed will be replaced by scientific methods, the trustworthiness of which no one will be able to put in doubt, and the efficacy of which will endure every test.

We have seen, in the course of these investigations, that there are diseases which, without producing insanity properly so called, deeply disturb the functions of the understanding. The disturbances they occasion are certainly wonderful, and calculated to excite surprise; but we are justified in affirming that they are subject to natural laws, and not to the fancy of the seven million four hundred and five thousand nine hundred and twenty-six devils of hell. This was not the opinion of the judges of the seventeenth century; and it is not one of the least of the benefits that science has conferred upon us, that it has affirmed and proved the innocence of the miserable sufferers from these diseases who were formerly consigned to the stake.
 * VOL. XVII.—25