"In this case, it is a question not only of storing vibrations of magnetic nature, but of really living nature, of real cerebral vibrations through the coating of the brain, stored in a magnetic crown, in which they remain for a greater or less length of time.
"To arrive at this phenomenon, instead of using an unresponsive physical instrument, I use a reacting living being—an hypnotized subject, who has thus become sensitive to living magnetic vibrations. I am presenting to the Society the magnetized crown, like several other models which I have already shown. It is adapted to the head by means of a system of straps, encircles it and leaves the frontal region free.
"It also forms a bent magnet with a positive and a negative pole. This crown was put, more than a year ago, on the head of a woman suffering from melancholia with ideas of persecution, agitation, and a tendency to suicide, etc. The application of the crown lead to the patient's getting slowly better after five or six séances; and at the end of ten days I thought I could send her back to the hospital without any danger. At the end of a fortnight, the crown having been isolated, the idea came to me quite empirically of placing it on the head of the 'subject' now before you.
"He is a male, hypnotizable, hystérique, given to frequent fits of lethargy. What was my surprise to see this subject, put into the somnambulistic state, complaining in exactly the same terms as those the cured patient had used a fortnight before.
"He first of all took on the sex of the patient; he spoke in the feminine gender; he complained of violent headache; he said he was going mad, that his neighbours came into his room to do him harm. In a word, the hypnotic subject had, thanks to the magnetized crown, taken on the cerebral state of the melancholic patient. The magnetized crown had been powerful enough to draw off the morbid cerebral influx of the patient (who got well), which had persisted, like a memory, in the intimate (or innermost) texture of the magnetic strip of metal.
"This is a phenomenon we have produced many times, for several years; not only with the subject now present, but with others.
"This communication is, amongst physiological phenomena, on a line with M. D'Arsonval's on the persistence of certain anterior states in inorganic bodies; it will no doubt cause much astonishment and scepticism amongst those who are not accustomed to hypnologic research.
"Doubts will be cast on the sincerity of the subject, on his tendency to produce wonders, to being carried away, and also on what may perhaps seem too easy an acquiescence on the part of the operator.
"To all these objections I will only answer: that this phenomenon of the transmission of the psychical states of a subject by means of a magnetized crown which keeps given impressions is quite in the order of the phenomena formerly communicated by M. D'Arsonval. And, further, the first time I made this experiment, it was done without my knowing, in an entirely empirical way. The impregnated crown was put on the head of the hypnotic subject about a fortnight after it had been put on the patient's head. There has therefore necessarily been a first operation, of which I did not foreknow the results; for we did not know any more than the hypnotized subject, what was going to happen, and the subject reacted, motu proprio, without any excitant other than the magnetic crown.
"So one can assert, without trying to draw any other conclusions, that certain vibratory states of the brain, and probably of the nervous system, are capable of storing themselves in a magnetized bent strip of metal, as the magnetic fluid is stored in the soft bar of iron, and of leaving persistent traces; still further, that one can only destroy this persistent magnetic property by fire. The crown has to be red-hot before it ceases to act, as M. D'Arsonval found to be the case with the iron bar."