be afterward incorporated into his larger
work. Among his patients, those who were of a quiet and lethargic
temperament, by simply pressing down the eyelids, were made to enter
into a peculiar state of languor, in which cataleptic contractions
were easily produced, and which forcibly recalled hypnotic phenomena.
"One can scarcely imagine," says the author, "a more remarkable
spectacle than that of a sick person sunk in deep sleep, and
insensible to all efforts to arouse him, who retains every position in
which he is placed, and in it preserves the immobility and rigidity of
a statue." But this impulse also was in vain, and in only a few cases
were the practical tests followed up with theoretical explanations.

Unbounded enthusiasm and unjust blame alike subsided into a silence
that was not broken for ten years. Then Charles Richet, a renowned
scientist, came forward in 1875, impelled by the duty he felt he owed
as a priest of truth, and made some announcements concerning the
phenomena of somnambulism; and in countless books, all of which are
worthy of attention, he has since then considered the problem from its
various sides.

He separates somnambulism into three periods. The word here is used
for this whole class of subjects as Richet himself uses it, viz.,
_torpeur_, _excitation_, and _stupeur_. In the first, which is
produced by the so-called magnetic passes and the fixing of the eyes,
silence and languor come over the subject. The second period, usually
produced by constant repetition of the experiment, is characterized
chiefly by sensibility to hallucination and suggestion. The third
period has as its principal characteristics supersensibility of the
muscles and lack of sensation. Yet let it be noticed that these
divisions were not expressed in their present clearness until 1880;
while in the years between 1872 and 1880, from an entirely different
quarter, a similar hypothesis was made out for hypnotic phenomena.

Jean Martin Charcot, the renowned neurologist of the Parisian
Salpetriere, without exactly desiring it, was led into the study of
artificial somnambulism by his careful experiments in reference to
hysteria, and especially by the question of _metallotherapie_, and in
the year 1879 had prepared suitable demonstrations, which were given
in public lectures at the Salpetriere. In the following years he
devoted himself to closer investigation of this subject, and was
happily and skillfully assisted by Dr. P