He accepts any statement as to flavours or odours; he swallows petroleum with delight, and believes it is champagne; mistakes salt for sugar, and mustard for honey. Of course, when all these tricks are played upon the platform, they are very far from always being genuine. A platform performance, in order to be successful in drawing money, must always have its dramatic and histrionic incidents. These desiderata cannot always be secured, and so confederates are paid to simulate the phenomena of hypnotism and suggestion; but there are few of the things done regularly at exhibitions of the kind which I have not seen repeated and surpassed from time to time in the study or the hospital ward. I refer to the works of Charcot, of Bernheim, of Moll, and of D6j6rine for the details of marvellous effects of suggestion in producing, without the consciousness of the patient, antics, muscular efforts, contortions, perverted beliefs, bizarre actions which have had no counterpart in stage performances; but in the hands of the honest and capable men to whom I have referred they are all ascertained to be due to the influence of suggestion upon persons previously robbed of their will and thrown into the hypnotic state by any of the methods of physical or mental hypnotisation to which I have referred.

It may be asked what are the added powers of clairvoyance, prediction of future events, insight into hidden things, and the development of new powers often attributed to somnambulists and hypnotics, and so frequently employed as a means of extorting money. The answer is given in one word - imposture - imposture - imposture! It is an imposture which has frequently recurred, and, though often exposed, is so lucrative and so attractive to the mystics and the so-called psychological researchers, that in one form or another it frequently revives.

In 1837 the French Academy appointed a commission to examine the marvels presented by blindfold subjects who had been submitted to what was called animal magnetism. All their pretensions were dissipated; there was neither magnetism nor any power of second sight. This report was disputed. Dr. Burdin then offered a prize of 3,000 francs to any person, somnambulist or otherwise, who could read without the use of his eyes. Six candidates from different parts of France presented themselves, for animal magnetism and somnambulism were then epidemic. A new commission was appointed, new failures occurred. Trials went on until October 1840, when, at the close of a series of ignominious failures, in which the tricks of each pretender in succession were unmasked, the Academy decided that it would no longer take notice of any comr munications relative to the imposture and folly, miscalled animal magnetism and clairvoyance. The same thing occurred with Sir James Simpson, who twenty years afterwards, when similar pretences were rife in the United Kingdom, and somnambulists and clairvoyants and thought-readers were again taking the field, offered to present a 5001. note, which he had locked in a box and placed in a bank, to anyone who could read the number as the note lay in the box.

It was never claimed. Mr. Labouchere's similar experiment with the so-called thought-reader Bishop is of quite recent date, but was performed under much less rigid conditions, and by a person whose pretensions, although they excited a great deal of attention, were more than usually absurd.

Finally, let me refer to an aspect of the influence of suggestion which as a possible social danger has engaged the attention of lawyers and physicians - the influence of deferred suggestion. It has been shown that not only will a hypnotic subject perform unconsciously, under the influence of suggestion, acts which are dangerous to himself and others, and are in themselves criminal - so that he can be made to thieve, to commit arson, or to attempt violence - but that certain subjects can, there is reason to believe, be made to receive a suggestion having in it a time-element. He can be told, 'On this day week, at a given time, you will return to the hypnotic state, you will go to a given place, you will steal such and such property, or you will attack such and such a person, and you will not remember who gave you the direction/ These are ex-treme cases, and this is a surprising and dangerous development of the influence of suggestion on the trained and practised hypnotic - that is to say, on the person who has habitually surrendered his will and made himself the creature of another individual.

So complex is the brain as an organ of mind, that we cannot attempt to folly explain the mechanism of tins operation; but there are facts within our ordinary knowledge which give some cine even to this phenomenon* There is a time-element in all nerve actions and the operations of the brain. It is a very common thing for a person who puts himself to sleep at night to say to himself, 'I will wake at six o'clock to-morrow morningt for I have to catch a train.' This is a familiar example of a deferred suggestion operating at a moment indicated several hours before. In abnormal conditions of the nervous system, a shaking fit of ague will return at the same hour every third day or fourth day. The sensation of hunger is periodic according to the habit induced by the hour of eating. This periodic, chronometric and involuntary operation of the nervous system is imported into hypnotism. There are also other more complicated examples of time-element in the active and passive functions of the brain. There are the two or three well-observed and thoroughly authenticated instances in which persons have been found to live two different lives, with different mental characters and different capacities, at regular intervals in the course of the year; knowing nothing and remembering nothing during the one period of what they were thinking or doing in the other.

Which of these should be considered the normal state of brain circulation, and which the abnormal or hypnotic, it would be difficult to determine; but to recall these facts suffices to indicate that the introduction of the time-element in deferred suggestion has nothing of the supernatural, implies no conferring of new powers on the individual, and is only the introduction into advanced and highly developed stages of hypnotism, of a functional action which is more or less natural with all brains. The only other examples to which I need refer of the attempt to import into the subjective phenomena described the element of the supernatural and the discovery of an unknown force are the socalled spiritualists and the telepathists. Their pretensions are only a revival under a new form of the old follies and deceptions - often self-deceptions, and still more often impostures - which surrounded the earlier introductions of the errors of the magnetisers, the spiritualists, and the mesmerists of the middle ages.