The patients to whom I had recourse were Marguerite ------, who was the patient actually in the wards of the Charite, and on whom Dr. Luys carried out, to use his own words, in my presence and that of Dr. Lutaud, Dr. Sajous, and M. Cremiere,' experiments relative to the psychical action, either attractive or repulsive, of the different poles of a magnetic bar on hypnotised patients.' 'I also showed him,' Dr. Luys continues, 'that glass tubes, containing either brandy or tincture of valerian, applied to the same patients, could determine on them effects peculiar to those substances/ In addition to this, Dr. Luys observes that he 'gave a few simple experiments and demonstrations, showing Mr. Hart, for instance, that when persons are hypnotised, their usual faculties are raised to an extra-physiological pitch, and that the patients see things that we cannot in our normal state distinguish; thus they behold the waves which are developed from a polarised bar, or from a magnetic needle, with their different colouring.' These experiments also were conducted by Dr. Luys at different sittings upon Marguerite and upon Mervel, as I have already described.

Dr. Luys considers that the statement which I have published of the results of my control experiments incriminate his honour as a man of science. I have, so far as I know, carefully avoided any comments which could be construed in that sense, although I have thought myself more than justified in intimating that he has pushed negligence in a so-called scientific investigation, put forward by him in great detail and with great solemnity for many years, to the utmost verge of blamable want of carefulness. This I shall have no difficulty in proving up to the hilt, and I shall adduce evidence which is incontrovertible and rests not only on my own observation but on that of highly competent and independent observers who were present at my experiments and who have signed the notes of the sittings.

As to the statement which Dr. Luys now makes - that these subjects were persons to whom he had long ceased to have recourse, being unable to depend upon their veracity - I do not know how to characterise it in any terms which in a matter of this sort I should be willing to employ. In the first place I must point out that if Jeanne, Marguerite, Mervel, and Clarice, the four persons whom he brought under my notice and on whom I operated, have long been known to Dr. Luys as persons who were untruthful and guilty of gross impostures; then he charges himself with going solemnly in the wards through a series of performances which he presented to me, to Drs. Lutaud and Sajous, and to M. Cremiere as reliable evidences of the phenomena he undertook to demonstrate on them. It was with Marguerite, with Mervel and with Clarice that he went through the performances of which he speaks and that I have already described. It was on Marguerite and Clarice that he demonstrated, as he states in his letter, the drunkenness supposed to result from placing a tube containing alcohol in contact with the skin, and the transfer by contact from Marguerite to Clarice of that drunkenness.

It was on Marguerite that in his presence Colonel de Rochas, whom he describes as his fellow-labourer and friend, demonstrated what Dr. Luys also describes as the Colonel's real and extraordinary discoveries of the externalisation of sensation, of the transfer of sensation to the air and to glasses of water. It was on Mervel that Dr. Luys demonstrated the extraordinary performance of the transformation of a man into a cat by the contact of a small tube containing valerian. It was on Mervel that he also showed the extra-physiological acuteness of vision, which enabled this man to behold the waves developed from a polarised bar or from a magnetic needle, with their different colouring. It was on these subjects, and no others, except Madame Vix and Jeanne, that I operated; and it was with these subjects that I ascertained and proved to the satisfaction of those who saw the experiments that the whole performance was a gross imposture. If Dr. Luys knew, as he now says that he knew, that the subjects were impostors, that knowledge, or even the present affirmation of it, would place him in a position which I would be most unwilling to believe - nay, which I do not for a moment believe - him to occupy.

I cannot suppose, and will not allow myself to admit, that he was presenting to us as subjects for scientific demonstration in his wards persons whom he had long known to be false and untrustworthy. I prefer to think that his letter was written under a sense of irritation, and that the statement to which I refer is one made by him without due reflection and which he will not be willing ultimately to maintain. For Madame Vix he is not directly responsible; though she was the subject brought by Colonel de Rochas to his wards and presented to me there. She was as great an impostor as the others, and Dr. Luys's affirmation of the reality of the phenomena which she presented is nothing worse than a merely reckless and irresponsible endorsement of the veracity of an utterly unreliable woman who subsequently showed herself in the opinion of myself and my friends to be a deliberate falsifier of facte.

There is one other point worthy of Dr. Luys's serious consideration in this matter. If he is willing to admit that Jeanne and Clarice are persons utterly unworthy of belief, as I have proved them to be, and as. he now alleges that he has long known them to be, then I must ask him, and I do ask him very directly and very seriously, what reliance can be placed on the whole volume of clinical lectures from which I have been quoting? Jeanne is the woman whose photograph he gave me on the last day of my visit to his clinic, represented as sitting with two others, presenting the most vivid image of delight and attraction towards the blue flames and influenced by the action of the north pole of the magnet, and repelled and horrified under the influence of the south pole. His book is full or Jeanne, and he is warm in his eulogies of her exquisite sensibility for hypnotic phenomena, and vouches for her sincerity. He speaks of her sometimes as Jeanne and sometimes as Mademoiselle V., a professor of foreign languages.