Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/91

Rh sleep. Even more; three persons of the audience fell asleep without Braid's knowledge, after following the given direction of fixing their eyes steadily on some point.

Braid's experiments, which are designated as the beginning of a scientific investigation of extremely complicated nervous phenomena, did not find at first the esteem and homage due to them, and gradually sank into oblivion. This is explained by the fact that they were associated with mesmerism; and Lafontaine, whose "magnetic" exhibitions were the first cause of Braid's investigations, protested, not without some animosity, that "hypnotism," or "Braidism," was identical with his "mesmerism." Braid himself, in the course of his experiments, seems to have lost his former scientific force as an investigator. Then, in 1848, Mr. Grimes, the American, with his "Electro-Biology," appeared, and took up the intellectual epidemic of mediums and spiritual apparitions, which we witnessed in astonishment, and saw the whole world more or less impressed by it. It was, naturally, then, not at all surprising that hypnotism, or Braidism, remained almost unknown to science. Only once it attracted scientific attention and interest, and then only for a short time. This was in 1859, in December, after Velpeau and Broca, two well-known French surgeons of La Société de Chirurgie, in Paris, caused the most immense sensation by placing twenty-four women in a sleeping condition by Braid's method, and then performing surgical operations without causing them the slightest pain.

Then much was said in the journals about "hypnotism" in hens, the description of which had already been found in one of Father Kircher's works. Although characteristic enough for those days, yet, to my knowledge, no one has been much impressed by the investigation of Kircher's experimentum mirabile, for it treats of a real state of hypnotism; and, with animals, every one feels safe from all thoughts of deception, but yet can bring into application all physiological means of investigation, in order to penetrate the mysteries of the phenomena. This proof of the actual appearance of hypnotism in animals is the scientific result of my above-communicated observations and experiments, which I intend to continue upon mammals, on which I have not yet experimented.

These, however, have still another interest for us. They have strikingly demonstrated how difficult it is to obtain actual facts from "events viewed unequally." They have still further shown us what insight, what strength of demonstration, and sharpness of criticism, scientific investigations demand; and, finally, they have made known to every discerning person how little weight should be attached to the reports of the most honorable and upright people, when these people are not entirely penetrated with the idea of the exact nature of the investigation.

This never-to-be-neglected foresight, in the estimation of reports