uld have
sufficed.

Plutarch, for example, would have come to the aid of the reporter. He
would have showed him Pyrrhus curing complaints of the spleen, by means
of frictions made with the great toe of his right foot. Without giving
one's self up to a wild spirit of interpretation, we might be permitted
to see in that fact the germ of animal magnetism. I admit that one
circumstance would have rather unsettled the savant: this was the white
cock that the King of Macedon sacrificed to the gods before beginning
these frictions.

Vespasian, in his turn, might have figured among the predecessors of
Mesmer, in consequence of the extraordinary cures that he effected in
Egypt by the action of his foot. It is true that the pretended cure of
an old blindness, only by the aid of a little of that emperor's saliva,
would have thrown some doubt on the veracity of Suetonius.

Homer and Achilles are not too far back but we might have invoked their
names. Joachim Camerarius, indeed, asserted having seen, on a very
ancient copy of the Iliad, some verses that the copyists sacrificed
because they did not understand them, and in which the poet alluded, not
to the heel of Achilles (its celebrity has been well established these
three thousand years,) but to the medical properties possessed by the
great toe of that same hero's right foot.

What I regret most is, the chapter in which Bailly might have related
how certain adepts of Mesmer's had the hardihood to magnetize the moon,
so as, on a given day, to make all the astronomers devoted to observing
that body fall into a syncope; a perturbation, by the way, that no
geometer, from Newton to Laplace, had thought of.

The work of Bailly gave rise to trouble, spite, and anger, among the
Mesmerists. It was for many months the target for their combined
attacks. All the provinces of France saw refutations of the celebrated
report arise: sometimes under the form of calm discussions, decent and
moderate; but generally with all the characteristics of violence, and
the acrimony of a pamphlet.

It would be labour thrown away now to go to the dusty shelves of some
special library, to hunt up hundreds of pamphlets, even the titles of
which are now completely forgotten. The impartial analysis of that
ardent controversy does not call for such labour; I believe at least
that I shall attain my aim, by concentrating my attention on two or
three writings which, by the strength of the arguments, the merit o