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PSYCHISM Analysis of Things Existing ESSAYS BY PAUL GIBIER, M. D. Director of the New York Pasteur Institute.

one may with some hypnotizable subjects make the following experiment, which we shall call the experiment of Horace Pelletier, inasmuch as it was made for the first time by that experimenter under the following conditions :

If one, or better, several sensitive subjects, having their hands placed over a jar of water, are ordered (verbal suggestion) to cause the liquid to move as if it were boiling, without touching it, one may after a relatively short time (it is useless to wait more than half an hour at each sitting) see the water beginning to ripple at first, and then moving as if a small fish were disturbing it by playful evolutions; then it begins to bubble as if it were boiling, so that sometimes it overflows and partly runs out of the jar. This is a phenomenon which the Fakirs of India easily determine by their mere presence or by the simple "laying on of hands" over the liquid. M. Pelletier, who has frequently written to us of this experiment, has not mentioned the fact that the subjects sometimes complain, as soon as the experiment is begun, of a pain in the arms and hands; it is an observation made in our own experiments. This same painful sensation is complained of by those who produce direct handwriting between slates.