ontend
against than others. It is still worse if, at the same time, their
surroundings are unfavorable to virtue; and this is a constant source of
increase to the criminal classes.

Wise statesmen will study the ways in which temptations to vice may be
diminished; but it is mistaken mercy and dangerous to the community to
spare the guilty when once they have committed criminal acts. If ever
the principle were admitted in our courts of justice that the possible
existence of mental insanity ought to protect a culprit from punishment,
crime would soon increase tenfold both in the sane and in the insane.
Both classes must be kept impressed with the conviction that the law
rules supreme and will not tolerate the destruction of public safety.
Your profession, gentlemen, in this matter as in many others, by its
sound views on Jurisprudence and Ethics, is one of the strongest
bulwarks of the common good.

LECTURE IX.

HYPNOTISM AND THE BORDER-LAND OF SCIENCE.

In this last lecture of our course I propose to make a brief excursion
with you into the border-land of science, a region chiefly occupied by
imposture and superstition. To show there is such a territory, we have
only to name a few of its inhabitants, such as mesmerism, animal
magnetism, odylism, hypnotism, mind-reading, faith-cures, clairvoyance,
spiritism, including table-rapping, spirit-rapping, most of which have
been used in connection with medicine. I do not maintain that all of
these are mere vagaries, empty shadows, without the least reality, mere
ghosts and hobgoblins, mere phantoms of the heat-oppressed brain, or
cunning devices of impostors to deceive a gullible crowd of the ignorant
public. Yet most of these are such beyond a doubt, and as such are
totally unworthy of our attention.

Medicine is a science; it deals with undoubted facts and certain
principles, and with theories in so far as they are supported by
well-ascertained realities. The border-land of which I speak presents
to our investigation few certain facts. It is chiefly the domain of
imposture. Charlatans and showmen and medical quacks call things facts
that are not facts. Among all the inhabitants of the shadowy region that
I have enumerated, there is only one considered to-day by the science of
medicine as worthy of its attention. It is hypnotism. As its first
origin is connected with the history of mesmerism, and the latter,
though itself a phantom, has been used as the chief patr