history." The report was read, but met with such decided disapproval that it was withheld from the public. Its fundamental error was the supposition that the demonstration of so unaccountable a phenomenon as reading without the use of the eyes was necessary to or could establish the existence of animal magnetism; they also erred through ignorance of the extreme rigidity of conditions necessary to exclude the endless possibilities of deception, conscious and unconscious, and of the remarkable subtlety and hyperæsthesia of hysterical and hypnotic subjects. The next scene upon the stage of the Academy of Medicine was enacted in 1837. At this time, the painless extraction of a tooth from a patient in a somnambulic condition aroused considerable attention, especially as the operator, Dr. Oudet, was a member of the Academy. Other painless surgical operations upon magnetized patients were reported. At about this time, Dr. Berna directed the attention of the Academy to his subjects, for whom he claimed such powers as reading with closed eyes. To test these claims a commission of nine was appointed, and reported promptly, July 17, 1837. This report was negative in the extreme. It raised the objection that everything was made to rest upon the testimony of these somnambulists; it declared that even the proofs of insensibility were defective, and flatly denied the existence of the condition of somnambulism. The alleged interpretation of the will of the operator was referred to unconscious suggestion; the attempt at reading with the eyes closed and the recognition of objects applied to the occiput was either a total failure, or depended for its small measure of success upon the shrewd guesses of the subjects, whose honesty was regarded as not above suspicion. "We are at a loss what to think of a somnambulist who described the knave of clubs on a blank card, who transformed the ticket of an academician into a gold watch with a white dial plate inscribed with black figures, and who, if she had been pressed, would perhaps have gone on to tell us the hour marked by this watch." The commission of 1837, even more specifically than that of 1825, was called upon to consider alleged marvels; and this circumstance should be taken into account in applying to them, as may properly be done, the same criticism as was directed against former commissions. They, too, have mistaken the real issue, and their justifiable skepticism regarding such facts as reading without the use of the eyes unduly biased their judgment in regard to the simpler and readily verifiable phenomena.