deceived, tried the tractors upon sheep, cows,
and horses, alleging that the animals received benefit from the metallic
plates, but none at all from the wooden ones. But they found nobody to
believe them; the Perkinean institution fell into neglect; and Perkins
made his exit from England, carrying with him about ten thousand pounds,
to soothe his declining years in the good city of Pennsylvania.

Thus was magnetism laughed out of England for a time. In France the
revolution left men no leisure for studying it. The _Societes de
l'Harmonie_ of Strasbourg, and other great towns lingered for a while,
till sterner matters occupying men's attention, they were one after the
other abandoned, both by pupils and professors. The system, thus driven
from the first two nations of Europe, took refuge among the dreamy
philosophers of Germany. There the wonders of the magnetic sleep grew more
and more wonderful every day; the patients acquired the gift of prophecy;
their vision extended over all the surface of the globe; they could hear
and see with their toes and fingers, and read unknown languages, and
understand them too, by merely having the book placed on their stomachs.
Ignorant peasants, when once entranced by the grand mesmeric fluid, could
spout philosophy diviner than Plato ever wrote, descant upon the mysteries
of the mind with more eloquence and truth than the profoundest
metaphysicians the world ever saw, and solve knotty points of divinity
with as much ease as waking men could undo their shoe-buckles!

During the first twelve years of the present century little was heard of
animal magnetism in any country of Europe. Even the Germans forgot their
airy fancies, recalled to the knowledge of this every-day world by the
roar of Napoleon's cannon and the fall or the establishment of kingdoms.
During this period a cloud of obscurity hung over the science, which was
not dispersed until M. Deleuze published, in 1813, his _Histoire Critique
du Magnetisme Animal_. This work gave a new impulse to the half-forgotten
fancy. Newspapers, pamphlets, and books again waged war upon each other on
the question of its truth or falsehood; and many eminent men in the
profession of medicine recommenced inquiry with an earnest design to
discover the truth.

The assertions made in the celebrated treatise of Deleuze are thus summed
up:[75] "There is a fluid continually escaping from the human body," and
"forming an atmosphere around us," which, as