All I want to warn against is the tendency to lend too ready an ear to such reports.

When the facts of any such case are clear, the legal decision to be arrived at should present no difficulties. Here the following provisions of the Criminal Code would apply: -

§ 176, Sec. 2.

(2) Any man who has criminal connection with a female who is deprived of will-power, or who is unconscious or insane, shall be punished with penal servitude up to ten years.

§ 177 of the Criminal Code.

Anybody who by force or threats enhancing danger to life and limb forces a female to have criminal connection with him, or who has criminal connection with a woman whom he has deprived of will-power or rendered unconscious for his purpose, shall be punished with penal servitude.

§ 178 of the Criminal Code.

Should any of the acts mentioned in §§ 176 and 177 lead to the death of the injured party, the punishment shall be penal servitude for life, or for a period of not less than ten years.

These paragraphs give us the punishment that enforced illicit intercourse with a person deprived of will or in an unconscious state entails. But even if, as we have seen, there is no question of unconsciousness in hypnosis, but only of a disturbance of consciousness, and also that the deprivation of will has its limits, we must abide by the phraseology of the Criminal Code, which differs from that of psychology. Different meanings are given to the idea "deprivation of will." Casper and Liman thought that the law intended by the term " deprivation of will" to protect persons who are mentally incapable of understanding the criminal nature of certain acts. This would include persons who are easily hypnotized. Krafft-Ebing certainly thinks that deprivation of will as mentioned in § 176, sec. 2, should be limited to those cases in which it is physically impossible for the person assaulted to offer resistance. But since a physical impediment may be of mental origin - as, for instance, would be the case in paralysis caused by suggestion - this interpretation would place many hypnotic states within the meaning of the paragraph. Nevertheless, other cases might present difficulties.

The question of deprivation of will has recently been discussed in all its details by Aschaffenburg in Hoche's Handbuch der gerichtlichen Psychiatric Aschaffen-burg contests Becker's definition of deprivation of will as a morbid state of mental activity which is not produced by mental disease, but in which free-will cannot be exercised in respect to certain actions (sexual misuse in this case), and he interprets the idea of deprivation of will as follows: - A woman who cannot be described as mentally diseased, but whose bodily and mental condition renders her incapable of exercising her will in respect to sexual advances, is to be considered as deprived of her will-power. At the same time, Aschaffenburg gives a definition of unconsciousness that implies that the inhibition of a person's power of resistance must depend on the state of his consciousness. At all events, there should be no difficulty in including hypnosis in the state of deprivation of will in the sense of the above-mentioned paragraphs.

In those cases of deep hypnosis in which, as we have seen, there is disturbance of self-consciousness, a state of unconsciousness of the nature implied in those paragraphs would necessarily have to be admitted.

It is somewhat more difficult to decide how far sexual excitement that is artificially produced should be considered a condition of deprivation of will within the meaning of §§ 176 and 177. The above question was also discussed by me in the case I have already mentioned, in which I was called upon to express an expert opinion on a criminal assault that had apparently been committed on a girl who was hypnotized, on account of the manipulations to which the girl had been subjected by the accused, apparently for the purpose of exciting her sexually. One of the witnesses even expressly declared that the accused had only made digital explorations for the purpose of rendering her amenable to his desires. There can be no manner of doubt that when sexual excitement has reached a certain degree the will becomes unable to resist the libido sexuaiis or prevent the actus itself. But it must be left to jurists to decide whether the paragraphs mentioned apply in such cases. At all events, this kind of deprivation of will has nothing to do with hypnosis.

But there are cases that seem to us offences against morality and yet are not deemed punishable according to the Criminal Code. A case of this kind actually occurred in Berlin, or at least was reported to the authorities as such. A boy aged fifteen asserted he had been hypnotized by a gentleman, who had then committed an unnatural offence on him while he was in the hypnotic state. The authorities came to me for my opinion, and I expressed my conviction that the boy was lying; apparently he had stayed away from home too long, and then had invented the yarn as an excuse for his absence. Still, such a case might really happen, and would come under paragraph 185, which deals with defamation of character. It could hardly be considered a punishable offence against morality, for § 176, sec. 3, of the Criminal Code only provides for punishment up to ten years penal servitude in cases of unnatural offences committed on persons under fourteen years of age, and sec. 2 of that paragraph prescribes the same punishment for any one who forces a woman to illicit intercourse while she is deprived of will or in an unconscious state.

It would therefore appear from the paragraphs that unnatural offences committed on hypnotized or narcotized persons who are over fourteen years of age are not punishable.

Among other punishable offences against hypnotics I may mention bodily injury, which in some cases might be caused intentionally - by post-hypnotic suggestion, for instance. We have seen that paralyses, loss of memory, etc., may be thus brought about. Jendrassik saw a case in which post-hypnotic paralysis persisted for several days. It is not exactly probable that these suggestions will ever be important from a legal point of view, and Lafforgue's supposition that a man might try to evade military service by causing a disease to be suggested to him seems to me even more improbable. At all events, the provision of the law as to intentional bodily injury would apply in such cases. It is much more likely for bodily injury to be caused by inattention to the proper precautions. Weinbaum published a case of this kind. A "suggestor" named Welmann, who was giving a performance at Insterburg, experimented on L., a schoolboy in the first form at the local high school. Even while the performance was going on L. behaved very strangely. Insomnia followed, and in three days' time L. was found to be mentally deranged and suffering from attacks of acute mania, sense-delusions, and megalomania; and at the end of a year he was still uncured.