At the same time, as if to bring an experimental proof of this assertion, Lasigue published a report on catalepsy in persons of hysterical tendencies, which be afterward incorporated into his larger work.  Among his patients, those who were of a quiet and lethargic temperament, by simply pressing down the eyelids, were made to enter into a peculiar state of languor, in which cataleptic contractions were easily produced, and which forcibly recalled hypnotic phenomena.  “One can scarcely imagine,” says the author, “a more remarkable spectacle than that of a sick person sunk in deep sleep, and insensible to all efforts to arouse him, who retains every position in which he is placed, and in it preserves the immobility and rigidity of a statue.”  But this impulse also was in vain, and in only a few cases were the practical tests followed up with theoretical explanations.

Unbounded enthusiasm and unjust blame alike subsided into a silence that was not broken for ten years.  Then Charles Richet, a renowned scientist, came forward in 1875, impelled by the duty he felt he owed as a priest of truth, and made some announcements concerning the phenomena of somnambulism; and in countless books, all of which are worthy of attention, he has since then considered the problem from its various sides.

He separates somnambulism into three periods.  The word here is used for this whole class of subjects as Richet himself uses it, viz., torpeur, excitation, and stupeur.  In the first, which is produced by the so-called magnetic passes and the fixing of the eyes, silence and languor come over the subject.  The second period, usually produced by constant repetition of the experiment, is characterized chiefly by sensibility to hallucination and suggestion.  The third period has as its principal characteristics supersensibility of the muscles and lack of sensation.  Yet let it be noticed that these divisions were not expressed in their present clearness until 1880; while in the years between 1872 and 1880, from an entirely different quarter, a similar hypothesis was made out for hypnotic phenomena.

Jean Martin Charcot, the renowned neurologist of the Parisian Salpetriere, without exactly desiring it, was led into the study of artificial somnambulism by his careful experiments in reference to hysteria, and especially by the question of metallotherapie, and in the year 1879 had prepared suitable demonstrations, which were given in public lectures at the Salpetriere.  In the following years he devoted himself to closer investigation of this subject, and was happily and skillfully assisted by Dr. Paul Richer, with whom were associated many other physicians, such as Bourneville, Regnard, Fere, and Binet.  The investigations of these men present the peculiarity that they observe hypnotism from its clinical and nosographical side, which side had until now been entirely neglected, and that they observe patients of the strongest hysterical temperaments.  “If we can reasonably assert that the hypnotic phenomena which depend upon the disturbance of a regular function of the organism demand for their development a peculiar temperament, then we shall find the most marked phenomena when we turn to an hysterical person.”