FURTHER PROBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM. (II.) 415

degrees of success or unsuccess of different operators in entrancing, stiffening, anaesthetising, &c., to the ' subject's ' varying moods of belief or distrust ; for it is not a monopoly of those who succeed as hypnotists to inspire the emotions of faith and expectation, which, before their success, they themselves are often far from feeling; while those very emotions have often been brought to bear on other operators, or other proposed means of alleviation, without having any result. Still, complete exclusion of the subjective factor will no doubt add indefinitely to the force of the evidence. The exclusion will tie us down to experiments of very special types. As a rule, of course, contact must be wholly avoided ; for it could hardly fail to reveal to the ' subject ' what is being attempted. There is, however, one class of persons with whom this objection does not apply namely, very young children ; aud I will begin with evidence drawn from that class. As usual, one has to deplore the lack of exhaustive experi- ments. The very last quality that competent persons can be expected to bring to bear on any hypothesis connected in their eyes with the mesmeric heresy, is patience ; and patience is undoubtedly required to devote ten minutes of laying-on of hands to each of a long series of suffering infants. As far as I know, Dr. Liebeault, of Nancy, is the only well-known practitioner who has taken this amount of pains; 1 and his conclusions are the more valuable in that they are opposed to the view maintained by him previously for many years that the therapeutical influence of hypno- tism is always and wholly a matter of suggestion and imagination. In his fitudesurle Zoomagnetisme (Paris, Masson, 1883), he describes experiments with 46 sick children of 4 years old and under (the large majority being under 3), in all of which some amelioration, and in most very distinct amelioration, followed his manipulation. The cases are not all of a crucial kind, the ailment having simply been diarrhoea or failure of appetite, which might have been about to mend in any case. But the cumulative force of the record cannot be denied ; and some of the individual cases are striking enough. One interesting feature was the frequent production of sleep, either during the contact or after it 1 Dr. Liebeault attributes the idea of his own experiments to information of similar successes which he received from a M. Longpretz of Liege ; and in part also to the account given long ago by Dupotet (without sufficient detail for scientific purposes) of movements and contractions which he induced in sleeping children by movements of his own hand in proximity to their bodies, in spite often of the intervention of the bed-clothes.