Dr. Roger moved that the Academy name a Commission to inquire into hypnotic suggestion, near and at a distance. Dr. Bronardel supported him. He said, "All that Dr. Luys has alleged and shown cannot fail to make a noise throughout the world. Nobody save MM. Burot and Bourru have gone so far as Dr. Luys. He not only forces on the attention of the Academy the question of hypnotism, but of persons being affected by poisonous substances which do not penetrate, or it may be even touch, their bodies. This is from a legal point of view a great danger. A great social responsibility is involved in the matter. It is the duty of the Academy to have the experiments of Dr. Luys repeated, with others that bear upon them." Hypnotism, or animal magnetism, has been a little more than a hundred years despised and rejected by the doctors. It was discovered by a Viennese, Mesmer, who belonged to that curious branch of the Freemasons, the Illuminati. When he told Stoerck, the head of the Faculty of Medicine at Vienna, of his discovery, that learned owl begged him not to discredit that body by talking of anything so absurd. He persisted. Sarcasm and then persecution obliged him to go abroad, and he came to Paris in 1778. The world of fashion and the court went crazy about him. He then set up in the Palais Royal, where, it must be said, in a way that was worthy of a charlatan, he worked his discovery. M. Le Roy, of the Academy of Medicine, thought him on the scent of a great truth. But the other doctors were of the bats' eyes sort, and hunted Mesmer down. He went to stay at Creteil, where he applied his method and made his famous magnetic pail, which interested M. d'Eslon, head doctor to the Comte d'Artois--later Charles X. He wrote about the magnetic pail. The Academy of Medicine warned him to be more cautious in speaking of quack inventions, and threatened to expel him from membership if he did not retract what he had written. That body even made a new rule to this effect: "No doctor declaring himself in favor of animal magnetism, either in theory or practice, can be a member of this society." Mesmer, hearing the police had their eye on him, went to Spa. But the ladies took his part with such ardor that the king named a commission to inquire into his discovery. Its members, too, were owls. They reported that "the magnetic fluid of which Mesmer speaks does not exist." Jussieu stood out against the owls and he only. He said: "All your efforts will not prevent this truth from making its way. They can only prevent this generation from profiting by it."