gerous
weapon in the hands of an unscrupulous man. If a person can
suggest to a subject in the hypnotic sleep that, at a certain
future day, he or she shall kill a person obnoxious to the
experimenter, or perform some other criminal act, and if the
act be duly performed, the subject being in a seemingly normal
state, and fully convinced that he acted solely through an
impulse originating in his own mind, it might appear as if
there was little safety left for honest people, and that a
villain might carry out his murderous schemes with perfect
impunity. In such a case as we have said, the mind of the
patient would cease to be his own, but would partly belong to
the person whose deadly thoughts it contained, and whose
involuntary agent it had become. Will the jurisprudence of the
future have to take account of such possibilities as this? Yet
it must be remembered that the great majority of people are
not susceptible to hypnotic influence, and that those whose
will can be so completely subjected to that of another are
comparatively few. Very few such have yet been found in
France. In America, the realm of a less excitable people,
still fewer could be found.

It may be said, moreover, that this influence in several cases
has been exerted for the good of the patient. One instance is
given in which the patient was a great smoker and drinker, and
voluntarily gave up both under the influence of hypnotic
suggestion. Several other cases of the same kind are related,
while a humorous instance is given of an idle school boy who,
impelled by a hypnotic suggestion, became a very ardent
student. After working off that spell, however, he obstinately
refused to be hypnotised again, apparently with the impression
that there was something uncanny in his unusual fit of
devotion to study.

THE GRAND SYMPOSIUM OF THE WISE MEN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

The question of our future destiny is paramount to all others in
dignity and importance. Upon this subject all wise men must have clear
and positive views. The editor of the _Christian Register_ of Boston,
according to the very common idea that men in prominent positions as
professors and decorated with college honors must be the wisest,
thought it well to ask them if science could take cognizance of the
question of immortality, and if its verdict was for or