Dr. Paul Farez, of Paris, and several other physicians, find that they are frequently able to change natural sleep into hypnosis by making passes over the sleeper and gently telling him not to awake. I have often done this in old patients, but I have never succeeded with people who have resisted ordinary hypnotic processes. Dr. Bramwell has the same experience (op. cit., p. 68).

Farez recommends the trial of what he calls suggestion somnique in many cases of insanity, neurasthenia, and in the correction of bad habits in children. Berillon states that Hansen, the Danish hypnotist, used as a boy at school to amuse himself by making suggestions to his sleeping comrades, which they often automatically carried out the next day. Such procedures open up possibilities of a not altogether agreeable nature. *

Moll points out that the disagreeable effects sometimes seen in the first induction of hypnosis by other means than simple suggestion are due, not to the treatment, but to the patient's fears, and he says he has noticed similar symptoms accompanying the use of electrical appliances in nervous persons. I once hypnotized a hospital patient" who became slightly convulsed and then passed into a very hysterical state. She confessed that she looked upon the process with great fear, as being very ' uncanny.' Bramwell relates how in one of his cases hypnosis was ushered in by a slight unilateral convulsion, but this did not prevent the operation being followed by cure. †

The gentleman, who is an M.D. of London, was in a nervous state from want of sleep, and hypnotism would probably have done him good, but after this experience nothing would induce him to submit to the process again.

* Revue de l'Hypnotisms, November, 1905; Journal of Mental Pathology, New York, June, 1901.

† British Medical Journal, February 28, 1891.

As regards the hypnotizability of different types - taking Sir B. W. Richardson's classification of men into animal, intellectual, nervous, and their combinations - I should say that the persons of the animal type, large-framed muscular men, of somewhat slow intelligence, but placid and easy-going temperament, unless aroused, are the best subjects. I have had several such among my somnambulists. Persons of the emotional type are not so easy to hypnotize, but once influenced are probably the best subjects for psychical experiments. I have seen a great many somnambulists of this class, and I think that any danger which may accompany hypnotism is only likely to occur in such subjects. Men of the purely intellectual type are not easily hypnotized; their minds are too analytical, and they are, as a rule, too unwilling to allow their will to be in abeyance. Nevertheless, their confidence gained, they sometimes make good subjects, though I have never seen a somnambulist of this type. A considerable number of my patients have belonged to mixed types - animal-emotional, which Dr. Richardson rightly says is not a pleasing combination; animal-intellectual, which is an enviable balance of qualities; and emotional-intellectual, a class comprising a very large proportion of brain-workers, and to which most geniuses belong.

I have found hypnotism easily applied and ex-tremely beneficial in the treatment of the neuroses to which this last class is especially subject. I have rarely reduced them to a state of somnambulism; and, as their minds are generally receptive, such reduction is not necessary. Undoubtedly the most difficult subjects to influence are those of weak and fidgety character, who are unable to look one in the face or fix their attention - their eyes being an index to their minds. I need hardly say that such a person as a medical man, who offered me five pounds if I would hypnotize him then and there at a medical meeting, is not hypnotizable unless he is able to change his mental attitude.

That insusceptibility to hypnotism is not a sign of intelligence is well shown by the fact that imbeciles and idiots are not hypnotizable. One of the severest rebuffs I have ever encountered in my professional experience was intlicted on me by a girl patient, an inmate of Paddington Infirmary. She was of an extremely low order of intelligence, and I suppose her bringing-up had made her very suspicious of everybody and everything. She was suffering from slight chorea, and it was thought that hypnotism would do her good. However, I exhausted the different methods in vain, and at length the patient flung my arm on one side, exclaiming, ' I'm not asleep, and ain't a-going to !' Dr. Hyslop, in an address he recently (1911) delivered before the Psycho-Medical Society, told us how, at a demonstration at Bethlehem Hospital, the operator closed the patient's eyes and said authoritatively,' Now you cannot open them.' The patient promptly did so, however, and shouted, 'You're a damned liar.' These are the sorts of things we are sometimes subjected to.

John Hunter, the great anatomist, has recorded (Hack Tuke) how he nearly succumbed to the wiles of a mesmerist, and only kept himself awake by fixing his attention on his great toe, in which he was expecting an attack of gout.*

The physician in charge of a large workhouse infirmary recently asked me to try hypnotism in his wards, and he picked out for me some suitable patients, as he thought. They were three broken-down hysterical women of low mental power, whose teeth chattered with fear when I looked at them. Of course such persons are most difficult to hypnotize, and one can only hope for success after repeated trials. I explained this to Dr. R------, and asked him to let me try on some more promising subjects, suggesting himself, his two assistants, and a ward nurse. They agreed, and he, one of the assistants, and the nurse, proved excellent subjects. In this relation I may say that people often give us quite impossible cases ' to try hypnotism on,' and when the inevitable failure results they are apt to say, ' Hypnotism has been tried, and has failed.' It is more satisfactory for the hypnotist to choose his cases himself than to allow a person ignorant of the treatment to do so.

* The peasant women of Brittany are said to send their children to sleep by making them look at a bright ball suspended over their cradles. This, the rocking of the cradle, and the monotonous song which nurses chant to infants, are distinctly hypnogenic agents acting by the monotonous and continuous stimulation of one sense. It is possible that children yield more quickly to such influences than adults, because their highest centres are as yet undeveloped, and therefore are more easily acted upon by inhibitory impulses proceeding from below. It is probable that the sleep of young children is of less mixed causation than that of adults: it is the result of inhibition almost entirely, the chemical products of cerebration which Preyer supposes exercise so soporific an influence being a quantiti negligeable.