and throw him into convulsions. During the crisis,
they possess an extraordinary and supernatural power, by which, on
touching a patient presented to them, they can feel what part of his body
is diseased, even by merely passing their hand over the clothes." Another
singularity was, that these sleepers who could thus discover diseases, see
into the interior of other men's stomachs, and point out remedies,
remembered absolutely nothing after the magnetiser thought proper to
disenchant them. The time that elapsed between their entering the crisis
and their coming out of it was obliterated. Not only had the magnetiser
the power of making himself heard by the somnambulists, but he could make
them follow him by merely pointing his finger at them from a distance,
though they had their eyes the whole time completely closed.

[73] _Introduction to the Study of Animal Magnetism_, by Baron
Dupotet, p. 73.

Such was animal magnetism under the auspices of the Marquis de Puysegur.
While he was exhibiting these phenomena around his elm-tree, a magnetiser
of another class appeared in Lyons, in the person of the Chevalier de
Barbarin. This gentleman thought the effort of the will, without any of
the paraphernalia of wands or _baquets_, was sufficient to throw patients
into the magnetic sleep. He tried it and succeeded. By sitting at the
bedside of his patients, and praying that they might be magnetised, they
went off into a state very similar to that of the persons who fell under
the notice of M. de Puysegur. In the course of time a very considerable
number of magnetisers, acknowledging Barbarin for their model, and called
after him Barbarinists, appeared in different parts, and were believed to
have effected some remarkable cures. In Sweden and Germany this sect of
fanatics increased rapidly, and were called _spiritualists_, to
distinguish them from the followers of M. de Puysegur, who were called
_experimentalists_. They maintained that all the effects of animal
magnetism, which Mesmer believed to be producible by a magnetic fluid
dispersed through nature, were produced by the mere effort of one human
soul acting upon another; that when a connexion had once been established
between a magnetiser and his patient, the former could communicate his
influence to the latter from any distance, even hundreds of miles, by the
will. One of them thus described the blessed state of a magnetic patient:
"In such a man animal instinct a