They are accompanied by danger to health, as I have often explained. And it must be added that, from the moral point of view, there is no justification for putting people into a condition which deprives them of will, for no higher object than for the amusement of the uncultured persons who constitute the major portion of the audience at such exhibitions.

Many Bills dealing with this question have been promoted in Germany. Still I think that the law as it stands is able to prevent any abuse in this respect. A few years ago Lentner asked whether it would not be advisable to insert in the Criminal Code a clause making the use of hypnosis by swindling quacks and money-grabbing showmen a punishable offence, as constituting a danger to health and personal safety. Rosenfeld also considers the existing regulations adequate. At all events it would be difficult to justify the inclusion of such a clause in the Criminal Code unless it were made applicable to those cases in which performers are compelled to risk their lives. Hanns Gross proposes that it is the people who organize such performances who should be punished.

1 "It should never be forgotten by scientists, that if from the history of hypnotism we wiped out the work of vulgarization done by four or five outsiders, who with courage and perseverance have proved its main facts throughout the length and breadth of Europe during the past fifty years - that history itself would entirely fall to pieces."

Attempts have occasionally been made to restrict the misuse of hypnotism by means of administrative measures. This happened, for instance, in Hamburg, where a well-known hypnotizer was fined for advertising his method of treating disease. The Senate of that town issued a decree on 1st July, 1900, dealing with the practice of medicine by unqualified persons, and § 2 of the decree prohibited the advertisement of methods of treating human complaints, should such methods be calculated to endanger health. In a case at the Hamburg Assizes, I was called in to express my opinion, as an expert, whether hypnosis, as advertised in the case before the court, was to be considered dangerous to health. In the end, no importance was attached to this point, since the court held that the decree of the Senate was inconsistent with the general trade regulations, and therefore null and void.

This completes our consideration of the bearing of hypnotism on jurisprudence. We have seen the direct practical importance of hypnotism to jurisprudence, and also that it must not be exaggerated. The legal importance of hypnosis is similar to the medical. It is not the fact that a hypnotic can be made the victim or the instrument of a crime; it is not the fact that we can induce retro-active suggestions hypnotically and thereby falsify testimony, that is all important in this respect, but rather the number of instructive lessons in jurisprudence that hypnotism has indirectly supplied us with. By teaching us the importance of suggestion it has opened up many a fresh field of view to the science of jurisprudence. In the instigation of crime, factors that are very similar to those employed in hypnotic suggestion often play a part; indeed, it may be that of a single finger, or even of one phalange. We can induce loss of memory in respect to a single word or a whole system of ideas, and that, too, without producing any other change in the subject's consciousness or in the least degree influencing his critical faculties (Vogt). When we consider how readily psychologists have at all times made use of dreams in the investigation of mental life, but that hypnosis is accessible for purposes of experiment in quite a different way to night-dreams, and that when suitable suggestions are made a hypnotic is more capable of self-observation than a person who is dreaming, it follows that Villa's dogmatic decision can only be ascribed either to total ignorance or lack of reflection.

Wundt has ascribed at least a limited amount of importance to hypnotism - about as much as to other abnormal states. He puts it down as a phenomenological method of research. More recently - in his Grundriss der Psychologic - he has gone so far as to admit that partial hypnosis may, under certain circumstances, be considered a general method of research. Beaunis ascribes even a still greater importance to hypnotism in respect to psychology. According to him, hypnotism is to psychologists what vivisection is to physiologists. Krafft-Ebing and Forel have expressed similar views, and Max Dessoir and Munsterberg also gave timely recognition to the psychological importance of hypnotism. Ribot and Wizel have used the hypnotic state for purposes of experiment, and have studied the mental life of persons in that state; they also made use of it for comparing the hypnotic with the non-hypnotic state. They found that hystericals give more accurate answers in hypnosis than in the waking state.