Parents should take particular pains to cultivate the will power of their children, in the right direction, of course. To stifle the will of children, when the exercise of it entails no bad consequences, is wrong, because it weakens their character, and makes them the prey of the wicked and selfish when they are grown to adult age. This influence which one person may exercise over another is not due to any particular force or magnetism, as was supposed by Mesmer, and which is yet claimed by ignorant frauds and pretenders, but it is simply a suspension of your own _will_, or a sacrifice of force of character. Dr. J. M. Charcot, of France, has lately taken up this subject, and has given it a great deal of attention. His researches have confirmed the experiments and conclusions of Braid, an English surgeon of Manchester, who, in 1841, showed that, in order to produce artificial somnambulism, there was no need of any extraneous influence, and that any person of moderate sensibility can easily produce in himself the “magnetic sleep” without any aid or act of another. Braid discovered that to simply fix the eyes for a few minutes on some shining object, placed a little higher than the ordinary plane of vision, and five or six inches from the eyes, caused that total abstraction which Doctor Braid called “hypnotism,” and which now, in honor of the experimenter, is often called “Braidism.” This Doctor Charcot calls “impersonal” sleep, artificially produced by mechanical means. He remarks: “The psychic characteristic of the state of somnambulism is an absolute trust, a boundless credulity on the part of the subject toward the one who has hypnotized him. Take one example from among a thousand: I present to a woman patient in the hypnotic state a blank leaf of paper, and say to her: ‘Here is my portrait; what do you think of it? Is it a good likeness?’ After a moment’s hesitation she answers, ‘Yes, indeed; your photograph! Will you give it to me?’ The image being now fixed in her mind, I take the leaf of paper, with a private mark, and mix it with a score of other leaves precisely like it. I then hand the whole pack to the patient, bidding her to go over them and let me know whether she finds among them anything she has seen before. She begins to look at the leaves one after another, and as soon as her eyes fall upon the one first shown, she exclaims, ‘Look! your portrait!’” This is the latest phenomenon, and proves how the mind may print an image on a substance, as the sun prints on a negative.