the
celebrated report, for Bailly does not mention such marvels, neither in
praise nor dispraise; he does not say one word about them. The
physicist, the doctor, the merely curious man who gives himself up to
experiments in somnambulism, who thinks he must examine whether, in
certain states of nervous excitement, some individuals are really
endowed with extraordinary faculties; with the faculty, for example, of
reading with their stomach, or with their heel; people who wish to know
exactly up to what point the phenomena so boldly asserted by the
magnetizers of our epoch may be within the domain of rogues and sharks;
all such people, we say, do not at all deny the authority of the subject
in question, nor do they put themselves really in opposition to the
Lavoisiers, the Franklins, or the Baillys; they dive into an entirely
new world, of which those illustrious learned men did not even suspect
the existence.

I cannot approve of the mystery adopted by some grave learned men, who,
in the present day, attend experiments on somnambulism. Doubt is a proof
of diffidence, and has rarely been inimical to the progress of science.
We could not say the same of incredulity. He who, except in pure
mathematics, pronounces the word _impossible_, is deficient in prudence.
Reserve is especially requisite when we treat of animal organization.

Our senses, notwithstanding twenty-four centuries of study,
observations, and researches, are far from being an exhausted subject.
Take, for example, the ear. A celebrated natural philosopher, Wollaston,
occupied himself with it; and immediately we learn, that with an equal
sensibility as regards the low notes a certain individual can hear the
highest tones, whilst another cannot hear them at all; and it becomes
proved that certain men, with perfectly sound organs, never heard the
cricket in the chimney-corner, yet did not doubt but that bats
occasionally utter a piercing cry; and attention being once awakened to
these singular results, observers have found the most extraordinary
differences of sensibility between their right ear and their left ear,
&c.

Our vision offers phenomena not less curious, and an infinitely vaster
field of research. Experience has proved, for example, that some people
are absolutely blind to certain colours, as red, and enjoy perfect
vision relatively to yellow, to green, and to blue. If the Newtonian
theory of emission be true, we must irrevocably admit that a ray cea