Some of the old adherents of animal magnetism - Kieser, for instance, and later on Charpignon - already recognized the legal importance of the subject. Thus the commission which investigated the matter in Deslon's time, besides their official verdict, sent in a private report to the king, brought to light apparently by the Revolution, in which they point out the special dangers by which it seemed to them morality was threatened. Liebeault also thoroughly discussed this question from the standpoint of hypnotism in his book in 1866, and his explanations are very valuable even now. Gilles de la Tourette, Liegeois, and especially Forel, Lilienthal, Bentivegni, Drucker, Heberle, Loos, Reden, Bonjean, Reese, Mesnet, Neumeister and Halgan have since studied the legal side of the question.

The first point I shall consider is the relation of hypnosis to crime, and I shall, as is customary, distinguish between crimes committed on, and by, hypnotic subjects.

Of course all those crimes that can be committed on a person in a waking state are equally perpetrable on the hypnotic. But some crimes are particularly interesting in this respect, and of such I must give the first place to offences against morality. F. C. Muller supposes that the fact that but few such cases have hitherto come to the notice of the law is accounted for by loss of memory, the subject being usually unaware of them. But Forel's supposition seems to me more probable; the experimenters know quite well that the per-manence of the loss of memory is not to be relied on. They are also well aware that the subject may unexpectedly remember the occurrences of former hypnoses. Liegeois, who certainly seems to have exaggerated the danger, suggested a kind of moral preventive inoculation. According to him, everybody should be tested as to their susceptibility to deep hypnosis, and the susceptibles should have it suggested to them that no one will ever be able to hypnotize them.

From time to time a whole series of such cases have been the subject of judicial investigation. In a case published by Wolfram in 1821, a doctor was accused of having assaulted a woman during the magnetic sleep, and of having endeavoured to avoid the consequences by procuring abortion, but when brought to justice he was acquitted. Liegeois has collected in his book, De la Suggestion, a series of cases that occurred in France; others are to be found in Golddammer's Archiv for 1863, and in F. C. Mullens book, Die Psycho-pathologie des Bewusstseins. The number would be slightly increased if some cases of auto-somnambulism were counted among them.

I will only mention a few of the more interesting cases.

One case mentioned by Liegeois is that of a professional magnetizer of Marseilles, who, in 1853, assaulted a girl in the magnetic sleep. The experts, Coste and Broquier, with whom the well-known authorities on medical jurisprudence, Devergie and Tardieu, agreed, gave their opinion that a magnetized subject might be assaulted against her will and without her consciousness. The case of Castellan in 1865, reported by Prosper Despine, is better known. Liegeois refers the case to suggestion; Castellan must have suggested to his victim, Josephine H., to love him, trust him, etc. But we can quite well understand what happened without referring to any special suggestive influence; it was merely a case of rape committed on a hypnotic. Castellan was condemned to twelve years' penal servitude upon the report drawn up by Roux and Auban, with whom the doctors Heriart, Paulet, and Theus were associated.

The Levy case, in 1869, is also interesting. A dentist of Rouen, named Levy, was charged with assaulting a girl, B., in the magnetic sleep. The case is remarkable, because the girl's mother was present and noticed nothing. Levy had placed his dentist's chair so that what he was doing could not be seen. Brouardel gave his opinion on the case and Levy was imprisoned for ten years. But the case certainly gave rise to much conjecture. Levy admitted the intimacy but denied that he had hypnotized the girl: she was perfectly willing. As Krafft-Ebing remarks, "it is impossible to decide on scientific grounds whether she was hypnotized or not" Maschka also thinks that this case was never properly cleared up, and Brouardel evinced some doubts at the trial.

The Mainone case, of which Schrenck-Notzing has given a detailed account, has recently attracted considerable attention (1901). Mainone, who advertised in the papers as a magneto-path and nature-doctor, treated a certain girl, Marie B. He was accused of inducing her to illicit intercourse while in the hypnotic state. Although all the specialists called in, including Schrenck-Notzing, expressed the opinion that the girl was an unwilling participant in the act, the jury acquitted the defendant. Obviously the weak-minded Marie B. did not strike the jury as being a particularly reliable witness, especially concerning events supposed to have taken place while she was hypnotized. Quite recently a magnetopath in Hanover was accused of assaulting two girls whom he had deprived of willpower by hypnosis. The trial, at which Bruns, Schwabe, and Delius appeared as experts, ended in the prisoner being condemned for an attempted offence against morality. In a case reported from Buda-Pesth, in 1901, a woman was said to have been seduced by being shown a photograph, with the result that she became neurotic. A few years ago a manufacturer of bicycles in Vienna was punished for seducing several girls while they were in the hypnotic state.

A case of this kind occurred in Berne, in 1903, in which a nature-doctor, R., was accused of committing a number of assaults on girls. R. was convicted of hypnotizing and assaulting, while they were unconscious, girls and married women who came to him to be treated for some disease or other. Some of the witnesses in the case had been assaulted by R. years before, and when asked by the judge why they had not complained to the police at the tim,e, replied that R. had forbidden them to do so. As a proof that such a command may retain its force for a time, at least, without the aid of hypnosis, I should like to call attention to the number of cases in which children are forbidden by servants to tell their parents certain things. Parents would often be very much surprised if they were only aware what their children know but conceal from them at a servant's bidding. Even a grown-up person sometimes feels so swayed by another that he obeys the latter's order not to disclose anything.