The latter phenomenon is brought about by the excitement produced by the experimenter's manipulations, and is also made manifest by acceleration of the respiration and heart-beat. This view, therefore, has something in common with that held by Preyer on paralysis from fright. Micheline Stefanowska, who has made numerous experiments on frogs and considers a frog in a stale of inanition particularly predisposed to hypnosis, holds an essentially different opinion. According to her, all these states are hypnoses, and she even thinks she can recognize the symptoms of Charcot's stages in the case of frogs; yet her experiments in this direction, and their results, have not produced any convincing impression on my mind, in spite of their interest and value and the many new facts concerning the life and physiological characteristics of the frog, which they have brought to light.

Another series of observations which were chiefly made for practical purposes may be mentioned here. They also may be regarded as hypnotic phenomena. For example, the so-called "Balassiren" of horses, introduced by the cavalry officer Balassa. This process has been introduced by law into Austria for the shoeing of horses (Obersteiner). It consists chiefly in looking fixedly at the horse, just as in "fascination." Other authorities - Glanson, for instance - have stated that restive horses may sometimes be checked by hypnotism. Lepinay gives a detailed account of hypnotism in respect to horses, and thinks that hypnotic influence can be brought to bear upon them. In particular, he thinks that vicious and restive horses can be soothed by music, and in this he is supported by Guenon. I shall deal later on with the case of "Clever Hans," which recently proved such a painful pitfall for Stumpf in Berlin, Hans' feats being attributed to hypnotism. Bruno is said to have hypnotized cats and pigeons, and Stoll believes that in other ways we work by suggestion on our domestic animals. He regards the influence of the rider on the horse or the mule, especially when particular tricks have to be combated, as suggestive, since scarcely anything can be accomplished here by brute force.

A kind of counter-suggestion appropriately brought to the animal's intelligence would thus oppose his idiosyncrasies, which are of the nature of auto-suggestions. The numerous experiments of Wilson should also be mentioned; he is said to have hypnotized a number of animals - elephants, wolves, horses, etc., in London, in 1839. Fascination is used by many animal-trainers, whose very first principle is to stare fixedly into the eyes of the animal they wish to tame. Many think that the charming of small animals by snakes is fascination. Hart and Lysing, however, believe that the animals are not hypnotized, but that, as the snake gazes at them, they hypnotize themselves. A case is reported in the Revue de l'Hypnotisme in which the opposite occurred - a snake was said to have been hypnotized by a cat. The story comes from Madras.

Of course, in many of the cases related above, imagination plays so great a part that absolute credence is not to be placed in all the details. There is a fable of Lafontaine's in which a number of turkeys took refuge in a tree so as to escape from a fox. The latter so fascinated the poor birds, which were watching him, by the glitter of his tail which he waved in the moonlight that they fell into his jaws. Thomas Willis tells a similar tale of a fox circling round a tree in which a cock was perched. The cock kept his eye on the fox, but finally fell from the tree and was devoured. In a communication to a French scientific journal, Guimbal ascribes all such cases to fascination.

Liebeault and Forel think that the winter sleep (hibernation) of animals is an auto-hypnosis; and so, perhaps, is the strange sleep of the Indian fakirs, which sometimes lasts for weeks and months (E. L. Fischer).

A number of trustworthy witnesses and authors (Jacolliot, Hildebrandt, Hellwald) tell us even stranger things about these fakirs, which set any attempt at explanation on the basis of our present scientific knowledge at defiance. Hildebrandt, among other things, relates that he saw a fakir sitting in a Hindoo temple; he was crouching down with his left arm stretched upwards; the arm was dead and so perfectly dry that the skin might easily have been torn from it. Another fakir had held his thumb pressed against the palm of his hand till the nail had grown deep into the flesh. It is said, besides, that some of these people can make plants grow very quickly.

Gorres mentioned this. These fakirs are also said to have been apparently buried for weeks and months, and yet have returned to normal life. Kuhn holds this to be an undoubted fact, the condition of the fakirs being that of hypnotic catalepsy. Of course, these things must be listened to with sceptical reserve. Yet even so scientific an investigator as Hellwald thinks that though no doubt there is a great deal of jugglery, yet some of the phenomena remain at present inexplicable. Lcewenfeld thinks that the observations which have been made show that in the so-called Yoga sleep the respiratory and circulating functions are not nearly as much in abeyance as has been assumed hitherto. Still, I cannot help doubting the genuineness of the Yoga sleep in the case of those natives who have been on exhibition in Europe. I have it on good authority, that two of these people who were supposed to be asleep, and "strictly watched by a committee of scientists," were playing cards with a third man a good way from the place in which the committee thought they were "sleeping." The agent admitted this swindle to my informant.

Many other observations recorded by ethnologists and travellers show striking resemblance to auto-hypnotic conditions. Stoll records many such facts; as, for instance, the auto-hypnotic state of the shamans or priests of various Siberian peoples, as recorded in the travels of Pallas and Gmelin. An Armenian physician, Vahau Artzronny, mentions a disorder which attacked a whole race, the Ezidi, in Armenia. When any of the people were brought to a spot and a circle drawn round them with a stick, they would rather die than step out of it. There would seem to be some suspicion of a superstition in this case, but it may have been a matter of fascination.

I have purposely made but brief mention of these matters and of the experiments with animals; details would take me too far.