It is not only amongst the corpuscular emanations of living animals that the Mesmerists asserted conflicts to occur.  They unhesitatingly extended their speculations to dead bodies.  Some ancients dreamt that a catgut cord made of a wolf’s intestines would never strike in unison with one made from a lamb’s intestine; a discord of atmospheres renders the phenomenon possible.  It is still a conflict of corporeal emanations that explains the other aphorism of an ancient philosopher:  “The sound of a drum made with a wolf’s skin takes away all sonorousness from a drum made with a lamb’s skin.”

Here I pause, Gentlemen.  Montesquieu said:  “When God created the brains of human beings, he did not intend to guarantee them.”

To conclude:  Servan’s witty, piquant, agreeably written pamphlet was worthy under this triple claim of the reception with which the public honoured it; but it did not shake, in any one part, the lucid, majestic, elegant report by Bailly.  The magistrate of Grenoble has said, that in his long experience he had met men accustomed to reflect without laughing, and other men who only wished to laugh without reflecting.  Bailly thought of the first class when he wrote his memorable report. The Doubts of the Provincial man were destined only for the other class.

It was also to these light and laughing souls that Servan exclusively addressed himself some time after, if it be true that the Queries of the young Doctor Rhubarbini de Purgandis were written by him.

Rhubarbini de Purgandis sets to work manfully.  In his opinion the report by Franklin, by Lavoisier, by Bailly, is, in the scientific life of those learned men, what the Monades were for Leibnitz, the Whirlwinds for Descartes, the Commentary on the Apocalypse for Newton.  These examples may enable us to judge of the rest, and render all farther refutation unnecessary.

Bailly’s report destroyed root and branch the ideas, the systems, the practices of Mesmer and of his adepts.  Let us add sincerely that we have no right to appeal to him in regard to modern somnambulism.  The greater portion of the phenomena now grouped around that name were neither known nor announced in 1783.  A magnetizer certainly says the most improbable thing in the world, when he affirms that a given individual in the state of somnambulism can see every thing in the most profound darkness, that he can read through a wall, and even without the help of his eyes.  But the improbability of these announcements does not result from the celebrated report, for Bailly does not mention such marvels, neither in praise nor dispraise; he does not say one word about them.  The physicist, the doctor, the merely curious man who gives himself up to experiments in somnambulism, who thinks he must examine whether, in certain states of nervous excitement, some individuals are really endowed with extraordinary faculties; with the faculty,