t held. Many of
the experiments upon him, shewing an extreme state of mental and
physical prostration, are rather painful to witness, others are
ludicrous; for instance, he is made to believe that he is out amid the
snow in the depth of winter--he shivers with cold, buttons up his
coat, beats the floor with his feet, brushes away the imagined
fast-falling flakes from his clothes, and almost imparts to the
spectators a sympathetic feeling of cold by his wintry pantomime: then
he is jocosely recommended not to stand thus shivering, but to make
snow-balls, and pelt the lecturer. Heartily, and with apparent
earnestness, he acts according to orders. Next, he is made to believe
that the room has no roof.--'You see the sky and the stars,
sir?'--'Yes.' 'And there, see, the moon is rising, very large and red,
is it not?'--'Yes, sir.' 'Very well: now you see this cord in my hand;
we will throw it over the moon, and pull her down.' He addresses
himself to the task with perfect gravity, pulls heartily. 'Down she
comes, sir! down she comes!' says the experimenter: 'mind your head,
sir!'--and the deluded patient falls on the platform, as he imagines
that the moon is coming down upon him.

These instances will be sufficient for our purpose. We have given them
as fair average examples of many others. If any reader still supposes
that these effects have all been mere acting and falsehood, we must
leave that reader to see and examine for himself as we have done.[4]
For other readers who admit _the facts_ and want an explanation, we
proceed to discuss the _modus operandi_.

In the first place, then, we assert that _there is no proof whatever_
that these effects depend upon any electric influence: there is
absolutely no evidence that the metallic disk, as an '_electric_'
agent, has any connection with the results. On this point, we invite
the lecturers and experimenters who maintain that electricity is the
agent in their process, to test the truth of our assertion, as they
may very easily. _Coeteris paribus_--all the other usual conditions
being observed, such as silence, the fixed gaze, monotony of
attention--let the galvanic disk be put aside, and in its place let a
sixpence or a fourpenny-piece be employed, or indeed any similar small
object on which the eyes of the patient must remain fixed for the
usual space of time, and we will promise that the experiments thus
made shall be equally successful with those in which the so-called
ga