Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/640

624 endeavor to demonstrate it to you. Yet, I am obliged to say expressly beforehand that I cannot promise you this experiment will succeed, in consequence of this large assembly, the light, and the room, which, in spite of the quiet and attention, is not wholly free from noise. I have never performed this experiment under such circumstances, and therefore cannot say whether any disturbing influence would affect my hen.

I must call to your remembrance, for my own safety as a careful and circumspect experimenter, that we are making a new experiment, or, in fact, an old one under somewhat altered circumstances. Therefore we must be fully prepared to make a new discovery, which will probably undeceive us in no agreeable manner, if it robs us of the pleasure of confirming, now and here, the wonderful accounts relative to the condition in which a timid hen can be placed after such apparently insipid and senseless preparations.

(The lecturer caused one of his assistants to bring him a hen and hold it fast upon the table. This was done after much resistance and many cries from the frightened bird; then with his left hand he held the head and neck of the hen upon the table, and with his right hand drew a chalk-line, beginning from the end of the beak, on the flat surface, which was of a dark color. Left entirely free, the hen, though breathing heavily, remained entirely quiet upon the table; then, without moving, it allowed itself to be placed on its back, and remained in this unnatural position until the close of the lecture. It only awoke when the audience began to leave.)

When I performed this experiment for the first time and with the same result as you now see, I was for the moment dumb with astonishment, for the hen not only remained motionless in its unnatural and forced position, but did not make the slightest attempt to fly away or to move in any manner whatever when I endeavored to startle it. It was clear the hen had lost the entire normal functional capacities of its nervous system under the apparently indifferent and useless arrangement of the experiment, and had been placed in this remarkable condition as though by magic. This state is characterized by a greater or a less suspension of its intelligence or will.

But nil admirari is the first maxim of the moderate investigator of nature. We must now ascertain the actual connection of these phenomena, so as not to stand still at an "event viewed unequally," like old Athanasius Kircher, the celebrated savant and Jesuit from Fulda, who affirmed this mysterious result in one of his works which appeared in Rome about 1646, "Ars magna lucis et umbrœ" as a positive corroboration of the immense imagination of hens. Kircher performed the experiment (which he called "experimentum mirabile de imaginatione gallinœ" and illustrated excellently with a fine woodcut) in the following way:

He first tied the hen's feet together with a narrow ribbon and laid