societies, as mutual trust and confidence advance, they are liable to be rudely checked from time to time as the rewards of the liar and thief temptingly increase. The very perfection of mechanical appliances is used by the burglar and counterfeiter, and only a high degree of educated ingenuity and a world-wide mercantile good faith could have made such a fiend as Thomassen possible. The invention of new machinery, the manufacture of new chemicals, the extensions of mining, and the commingling of increased travel, in their accidents and sometimes in their baneful results in common pursuit, render the tasks of physician and surgeon more difficult than ever before. The complications of modern life are so great and varied, that the moral laws do not possess the direct and simple force they had of old; in the surge and vortex of to-day it takes a keen intellect to separate right from wrong, and many err because their consciences are not reinforced by education for the new exigencies.
Evolution is underlaid, as is all change, by the greater law of the persistence of force, ever holding the even balance through all complexity, maintaining throughout all a just compensation. Every new faculty and enjoyment is earned by its equivalent of work, trouble, or ill; with every addition to power comes an addition to wants, to labor, and the possibilities of pain. As the stores of the mind increase so also do ideals craving satisfaction become higher and wider: ever "on the isthmus of a middle state," man is at once a record of the past and a prophecy of the future; limited by his inheritance to definite acquirement, he yet aspires, by nascent impulses, for such better things as only his posterity can ever possess.
| EXPERIMENTS ON HYPNOTISM. |
By FRANKLIN CHASE CLARKE, M. D.
SOME time ago my attention was called to two articles on "Hypnotism in Animals," in the columns of The Popular Science Monthly,[1] in which I became very deeply interested.
For the sake of those who may have forgotten what the author, Prof. Czermak, said in regard to these very curious phenomena as observed in fowls, I will briefly describe his mode of proceeding, and afterward give the results of my own experiments.
And, first, of the crawfish experiment. If a crawfish is held firmly in one hand, while with the other "passes" are made along the back of the animal from head to lower extremity, the animal will become so quieted as to allow itself to be placed in any position whatever, even the most unnatural, without once stirring. Among people generally
- ↑ September and November, 1873.
