fathers), nor will it cure cancer or pneumonia, or knit a bone; but, in spite of these nineteenth-century restrictions, such as we find it, faith is a most precious commodity, without which we should be very badly off. _Hypnotism_, introduced by Mesmer in the eighteenth century, has had several revivals as a method of treatment during the nineteenth century. The first careful study of it was made by Braid, a Manchester surgeon, who introduced the terms hypnotism, hypnotic, and nervous sleep; but at this time no very great measure of success followed its use in practice, except perhaps in the case of an Anglo-Indian surgeon, James Esdaile, who, prior to the introduction of anæsthesia, had performed two hundred and sixty-one surgical operations upon patients in a state of hypnotic unconsciousness. About 1880 the French physicians, particularly Charcot and Bernheim, took up the study, and since that time hypnotism has been extensively practised. It may be defined as a subjective psychical condition, what Braid called nervous sleep, resembling somnambulism, in which, as Shakespeare says, in the description of Lady Macbeth, the person receives at once the benefit of sleep and does the effects or acts of watching or waking. Therapeutically, the important fact is that the individual’s natural susceptibility to suggestion is increased, and this may hold after the condition of hypnosis has passed away. The condition of hypnosis is usually itself induced by suggestion, requesting the subject to close the eyes, to think of sleep, and the operator then repeats two or three times sentences suggesting sleep, and suggesting that the limbs are getting heavy and that he is feeling drowsy. During this state it has been found that the subjects are very susceptible to suggestion. Too much must not be expected of hypnotism, and the claims which have been made for it have been too often grossly exaggerated. It seems, as it has been recently well put, that hypnotism “at best permits of making suggestions more effective for good or bad than can be done upon one in his waking state.” It is found to be of very little use in organic disease. It has been helpful in some cases of hysteria, in certain functional spasmodic affections of the nervous system, in the vicious habits of childhood, and in suggesting to the victims of alcohol and drugs that they should get rid of their inordinate desires. It has been used successfully in certain cases for the relief of labor pains, and in surgical operations; but on the whole, while a valuable agent in a few cases, it has scarcely fulfilled the expectations of its advocates. It is a practice not without serious dangers, and should never be performed except in the presence of a third person, and its indiscriminate practice by ignorant persons should be prevented by law.