mesmerist, and had been similarly employed in other towns, and even in foreign countries.

I cannot believe that many thoughtful people will be found to defend such degrading shows as those referred to, where nothing better is aimed at than to stitch tongues, and make the hirelings eat potatoes for apples and fight for candle-ends as fiercely as though sugar-stick was at stake. For men to be kept two or three hours a day in such a condition cannot, to say the least, be very beneficial, and the effect of such performances may be harmful to hysterical and weakly persons in the audience, and is certain to prevent people seeking relief from the legitimate use of the agency under discussion.

It seems to me high time for us to follow the lead of other countries, where such shows are prohibited.

Before passing on, however, I think it only fair to say that the showmen have unwittingly served a useful purpose, for they have, by persistently keeping the thing before the public, prevented its being forgotten.

(2) Whether any one set of people should have the exclusive privilege of studying hypnotism, or not, is a more difficult problem.

Having such an undoubted influence on disease, pain, crime, and morals, it seems to go without saying that the public generally, but the clergy, lawyers, and doctors in particular, should at least be familiar with the broad principles of hypnotism; but whether all should be at liberty to practise it is not so easy to decide at first sight.

If hypnotism were a concrete material, or an agent like electricity, the answer would be simple; but, seeing that it is a state essentially affecting the mind of another, and that no experiments of value can take place except where the subject is a human being (or, at any rate, a living animal-for horses, dogs, birds, &c., can be hypnotised), the question must be seriously considered.

At Birmingham, I urged that the use of hypnotism should be confined to authorised persons,' and I see no reason for varying this contention, which would allow any man or woman, who satisfied the authorising body that he or she was a suitable person to work in the department, to obtain the required permission.

An analogous case is that of vivisection, which is so restricted that not even medical men dare practise it without first obtaining a license from the proper authority.

Mr. Innes, on the other hand, claims that 'everyone shall have freedom to investigate all the secrets and to exercise all the powers of nature and of mind, reserving to law the right ex post facto to punish the abuses of the liberty which it concedes.'

This is styled a' most healthful general rule,' and a 'fundamental principle of legislation.'

But now, taking Mr. Innes' own data (which, however, I have

shown to be incorrect), does not his conclusion seem-shall I say strange?

In effect, he asserts that it is the easiest thing in the world to extort a cheque from a subject without his knowledge; to outrage a woman without the slightest resistance on her part, and with little fear of detection; to bring false and maybe ruinous charges against an innocent man, and prove them by the aid of witnesses who swear to what has never happened, though they believe their evidence to be true; and, having told us all this, he argues that every criminal who preys upon society should be at liberty to investigate all the secrets and exercise all the powers of hypnotism, on the ground that, if any restrictions are placed upon such investigation and exercise, this 'most healthful general rule,' this fundamental principle of legislation, would be departed from.

But is it not a more healthful general rule, and a more fundamental principle of legislation, that the weak, innocent, and helpless should be protected from dangers which are known to exist?

Do the public wish to be robbed, violated, defamed, and ruined, in order that every unscrupulous person may investigate the secrets of nature and exercise all the powers of mind?

Much better, it seems to me, to guard as far as possible against such perils than to rest satisfied that the law will punish abuses ex post facto, especially as many of these abuses are, according to Mr. Innes, difficult of detection.

If, however, the investigation and practice of hypnotism be limited to those who are authorised,' the risk of abuse will be reduced to a minimum.

(c) Should hypnotism be confided to the medical profession alone? This third proposition is the most delicate, for there is much force in Mr. Innes' remark that for years the whole profession has ignored the subject.

Mr. Innes admits, in the case of poisons, that so soon as the medical faculty made a study of their nature and uses there was good ground for placing these agents in their care, and even allows that, when the profession makes a similar study of hypnotism, there may be some reason for claiming that they should have the exclusive right to the care of it also.

Has the profession, then, begun to inquire into the nature and value of hypnotism?

Take the test case cited by Mr. Innes-a case of murder or personal violence, and a defence that the crime was committed under hypnotic influence. Such a case is not at all fanciful, and I would not be surprised if such a trial were enacted at no distant date. Only the other day, one of the leading London papers went out of its

2 This article was written and in the hands of the Editor before the recent and notorious trial for murder in Paris.-ED. Nineteenth Century.

way to suggest that a woman who was about to be tried for murder might have acted under the hypnotic directions of her husband.

Mr. Innes' question is: Given such a case to-morrow, are there medical men to be found who could be called as skilled witnesses?— men who can discriminate hypnosis from madness, hysteria, somnambulism, sleep, or lethargy; who can tell what proportion of healthy people in every room can be hypnotised; who can measure what control an operator may exert over his subject's imagination, will, and memory-how far he can produce post-hypnotic hallucinations; men who can, in the particular case of the prisoner, say whether he is capable of being hypnotised or not, and who can elicit the truth by means of the 'memory bridge'?

To all these questions I most unhesitatingly answer, Yes, there are medical men of repute in England who have so studied and practised hypnotism that they fulfil all the requirements of Mr. Innes' ideal skilled witness. As yet, it must be admitted, there are few such, but there are already enough to meet emergencies; and now that the British Medical Association has, at the instigation of these experts, taken a first step in the impartial and scientific examination of the subject, the public may rest assured that they will have skilled witnesses in increasing numbers.

And who so fit to study this serious subject as men whose whole lives are spent in fathoming the secrets of human existence; who are educated in the anatomy, chemistry, physiology, and psychology of mankind; who are familiar with the body in health and sickness; who watch the building up of a being before it is born, and who examine it when the breath has left the nostrils; whose one aim in life is to equip themselves with everything which can preserve health, prolong life, alleviate suffering, and eradicate disease?

But, after all, has the medical profession lodged any serious claim to the patent rights in this particular field?

There are men outside the profession who have for years been investigating from various points the mysteries of this science, and who have done good work and recorded valuable evidence.

Far be it from me not to welcome such scientists as fellowworkers; and it was with the express desire of fully recognising their services, that at Birmingham I suggested the confiding of hypnotism, not to medical hands alone, but to those of authorised persons.'

6

The medical profession is far too catholic to be churlish, and has never been backward in recognising and rewarding the help it has received from those outside its own ranks. We have not been slow, in the region of medical jurisprudence, to gratefully accept the cooperation and guidance of the sister profession of the law; in physiology, much of recent advance has come from those who were not members of our profession; in chemistry and bacteriology, the labours of such men as Roscoe and Pasteur have been freely and fully

acknowledged; in electricity we have not been behindhand in availing ourselves of the genius of Edison.

And so in hypnotism, I am sure the medical profession will not demand, as Mr. Innes supposes, that all who are not medical men shall be 'warned off;' but if in due time they ask that the Legislature will enact regulations to prohibit public shows which are degrading and dangerous, and which have no useful object, and to limit the practice of hypnotism to medical men, and such other persons as can satisfy some duly appointed authority that their aim is legitimate, I think such request will be considered reasonable, and both deserve and receive the hearty support of the public.

GEO. C. KINGSBURY.

ANIMAL IMMORTALITY.

Is there any living existence in store for the lower animals after physical death?

The problem is an old one, and it has been answered in various ways. The belief in the survival of animal ghosts is still common to a large number of savage communities; though such ghosts, as a rule, seem to be only shadowy reproductions of the living animals, which grow fainter and fainter, till they die out of the ken of the rude thought which created them. But among the earliest philosophers of antiquity, as among the modern Buddhists, there was a strong belief in a more permanent continuity of animal existence, which rested on the theory of metempsychosis. Traces of this belief appear in the philosophy of Heraclitus. Empedocles and the Pythagoreans held the generic identity of human and animal souls so strongly that they condemned the consumption of animal food, and indeed the destruction of any animal life: and the doctrine of metempsychosis is distinctly formulated in Plato's famous description at the end of the Republic of the vision of Er.

Early Christianity was too deeply concerned with the hereafter of the human soul to pay much attention to the eschatology of animals; and it was not till the seventeenth century that the question was brought into some prominence by the Cartesian theory that the lower animals were automata, and as such devoid of feeling, expressly on the ground that they had no souls. This view was readily adopted by the theologians of the age, who saw in it a path of escape from the moral difficulty presented by the existence of animal suffering. Pascal regarded it as a means of exculpating Divine benevolence from the imputation of purposeless cruelty; and Malebranche supported it, because, though opposed to reason, it was in accordance with

1 Empedocles seems to have thought that the souls of men and animals were souls which had been banished from heaven for their offences, and doomed to do penance in some body of the lower earth. He describes himself as

φυγὰς θεόθεν καὶ ἀλήτης νείκει μαινομένῳ πίσυνος

i.e., 'an outcast from godhome and a wanderer, a slave to raving strife.' Elsewhere he declares that he has been in turn a youth, a maid, a bush, a bird, and a dumb fish in the sea.'