A natural conclusion from the facts above detailed is, that the strange power here indicated might prove a very dangerous 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 against a future life. Such questions he addressed to twenty-three professors, presidents, doctors of laws, etc. But he did not reflect that there were several hundred gentlemen in Boston who had more knowledge on this subject, and who could give him positive and reliable information, and he entirely forgot that the only scientist who has examined this question from the physiological standpoint resides in Boston.