It was also to these light and laughing souls that Servan exclusively addressed himself some time after, if it be true that the _Queries of the young Doctor Rhubarbini de Purgandis_ were written by him. Rhubarbini de Purgandis sets to work manfully. In his opinion the report by Franklin, by Lavoisier, by Bailly, is, in the scientific life of those learned men, what the _Monades_ were for Leibnitz, the _Whirlwinds_ for Descartes, the _Commentary on the Apocalypse_ for Newton. These examples may enable us to judge of the rest, and render all farther refutation unnecessary. Bailly's report destroyed root and branch the ideas, the systems, the practices of Mesmer and of his adepts. Let us add sincerely that we have no right to appeal to him in regard to modern somnambulism. The greater portion of the phenomena now grouped around that name were neither known nor announced in 1783. A magnetizer certainly says the most improbable thing in the world, when he affirms that a given individual in the state of somnambulism can see every thing in the most profound darkness, that he can read through a wall, and even without the help of his eyes. But the improbability of these announcements does not result from the celebrated report, for Bailly does not mention such marvels, neither in praise nor dispraise; he does not say one word about them. The physicist, the doctor, the merely curious man who gives himself up to experiments in somnambulism, who thinks he must examine whether, in certain states of nervous excitement, some individuals are really endowed with extraordinary faculties; with the faculty, for example, of reading with their stomach, or with their heel; people who wish to know exactly up to what point the phenomena so boldly asserted by the magnetizers of our epoch may be within the domain of rogues and sharks; all such people, we say, do not at all deny the authority of the subject in question, nor do they put themselves really in opposition to the Lavoisiers, the Franklins, or the Baillys; they dive into an entirely new world, of which those illustrious learned men did not even suspect the existence. I cannot approve of the mystery adopted by some grave learned men, who, in the present day, attend experiments on somnambulism. Doubt is a proof of diffidence, and has rarely been inimical to the progress of science. We could not say the same of incredulity. He who, except in pure mathematics, pronounces the word _impossible_, is deficient in prudence. Reserve is especially requisite when we treat of animal organization.