ve than this portion of
the work of the commissioners. They go first to Dr. Jumelin, who, let it
be observed, obtains the same effects, the same crises as Deslon and
Mesmer, by magnetizing according to an entirely different method, and
not restricting himself to any distinction of poles; they select persons
who seem to feel the magnetic action most forcibly, and put their
imagination at fault by now and then bandaging their eyes.

What happens then?

When the patients see, the seat of the sensations is exactly the part
that is magnetized; when their eyes are bandaged, they locate these same
sensations by chance, sometimes in parts very far away from those to
which the magnetizer is directing his attention. The patient, whose eyes
are covered, often feels marked effects at a time when they are not
magnetizing him, and remains, on the contrary, quite passive while they
are magnetizing him, without his being aware of it.

Persons of all classes offer similar anomalies. An instructed physician,
subjected to these experiments, "feels effects whilst nothing is being
done, and often does not feel effects while he is being acted upon. On
one occasion, thinking that they had been magnetizing him for ten
minutes, this same doctor fancied that he felt a heat in his lumbi,
which he compared to that of a stove."

Sensations thus felt, when no magnetizing was exerted, must evidently
have been the effect of imagination.

The commissioners were too strict logicians to confine themselves with
these experiments. They had established that imagination, in some
individuals, can occasion pain, and heat--even a considerable degree of
heat--in all parts of the body; but practical female Mesmerizers did
more; they agitated certain people to that pitch, that they fell into
convulsions. Could the effect of imagination go so far?

Some new experiments entirely did away with these doubts.

A young man was taken to Franklin's garden at Passy, and when it was
announced to him that Deslon, who had taken him there, had magnetized a
tree, this young man ran about the garden, and fell down in convulsions,
but it was not under the magnetized tree: the crisis seized him while
he was embracing another tree, very far from the former.

Deslon selected, in the treatment of poor people, two women who had
rendered themselves remarkable by their sensitiveness around the famous
rod, and took them to Passy. These women fell into convulsions whenever
they t