cause him, by mere force of will, to approach from a distance.
A very curious result of this supposed reciprocal influence of mesmerist and subject was demonstrated in the forties by some of our English mesmerists. The entranced subject, it was shown, would frequently be able to share the sensations of his mesmerist, to taste what he was eating, or to feel what he was feeling. The manifestations of this curious faculty—the existence of which, whatever its explanation, has been confirmed by later experiment—are sometimes extremely ludicrous. In the hypnotic sleep it is as a rule quite easy to make the subject insensible to pain. I have seen a youth in this condition who suffered gladly the most injurious attacks upon his own person—who would allow his hair to be pulled, his ears pinched, his fingers even to be scorched by lighted matches. But the same youth would the next moment indignantly resent the slightest injury inflicted upon his hypnotiser, who would all the time be standing at the other end of the room.
Professor Barrett was in the present generation the first to reproduce experimental results similar to those recorded by Elliotson and his contemporaries, and his lead has since been followed by many others. But the later experiments have been conducted under much stricter conditions. It is comparatively easy to exclude deliberate fraud: the real difficulty lies in the fact that the hypnotic subject—and experiments of this kind are found to
