Whatever may be said of Mesmer, there seems to be no doubt about the honesty of his most famous pupil, the Marquis de Puysegur, and to him we are indebted for a forward step. When Mesmer left Paris, the marquis retired to his estate near Soissons, and employed his leisure in magnetizing peasants. He magnetized his gardener, a young man named Victor, and after experimenting upon him claimed that during the state Victor exhibited marvellous telepathic and clairvoyant phenomena. Unable to attend all the patients who applied to him, he followed Mesmer's plan of magnetizing a tree. An elm on the village green was chosen, and round this patients gathered on stone benches as around Mesmer's _baquet_. Following Mesmer's theories very closely, the contribution he made was in the recognition of the likeness between the magnetized state and that of somnambulism, so that he designated this state "artificial somnambulism." He also modified the conditions of inducing this state, and simple contact or spoken orders were substituted for the use of the _baquet_. The effect was therefore milder, and instead of hysteria and violent crises accompanied by sobs, cries, and contractions, there was peaceful slumber. He recognized the rapport between operator and subject, and amnesia on awaking, and other phenomena now well known, but he still held to the Mesmeric theory of the existence of a universal fluid which saturated all bodies, especially the human body. It was electric in nature, and man could display and diffuse this electric fluid at will. While the Marquis de Puysegur was using the elm tree near Soissons, the Chevalier de Barbarin was successfully magnetizing people without paraphernalia. He sat by the bedside of the sick and prayed that they might be magnetized; his efforts were successful. He maintained that the effect of animal magnetism was produced by the mere effort of one human soul acting upon another; and when the connection had once been established the magnetizer could communicate his influence to the subject regardless of the distance which separated them. Numerous persons adopted this view, calling themselves Barbarinists after their leader. In Sweden and Germany they were called _spiritualists_, to distinguish them from the followers of de Puysegur, who were called _experimentalists_. About the same time a doctor of Lyons, Petetin, experimented with magnetism. After his death a paper written by him was published describing catalepsy and sense transference. Numerous magnetic societies were founded in the principal cities of France. In Strasburg, the Society of Harmony, consisting of more than one hundred and fifty members, published for years the result of their work. The disturbance incident to the Revolution and the wars of the Empire which followed repressed the investigations of magnetism in France for several years.