ge effects on some individuals. Among
the obnoxious noises are the crumpling of silk stuffs, the sound of
sweeping, the croaking of frogs. The effects in different cases have
been spasms, a sense of strangling, profuse sweating,--all showing a
profound disturbance of the nervous system.

All these effects were produced by impressions on the organs of sense,
seemingly by direct agency on certain nerve centres. But there is
another series of cases in which the imagination plays a larger part in
the phenomena. Two notable examples are afforded in the lives of two
very distinguished personages.

Peter the Great was frightened, when an infant, by falling from a bridge
into the water. Long afterward, when he had reached manhood, this hardy
and resolute man was so affected by the sound of wheels rattling over a
bridge that he had to discipline himself by listening to the sound, in
spite of his dread of it, in order to overcome his antipathy. The story
told by Abbe Boileau of Pascal is very similar to that related of Peter.
As he was driving in his coach and four over the bridge at Neuilly, his
horses took fright and ran away, and the leaders broke from their harness
and sprang into the river, leaving the wheel-horses and the carriage on
the bridge. Ever after this fright it is said that Pascal had the
terrifying sense that he was just on the edge of an abyss, ready to fall
over.

What strange early impression was it which led a certain lady always to
shriek aloud if she ventured to enter a church, as it is recorded? The
old and simple way of accounting for it would be the scriptural one, that
it was an unclean spirit who dwelt in her, and who, when she entered the
holy place and brought her spiritual tenant into the presence of the
sacred symbols, "cried with a loud voice, and came out of" her. A very
singular case, the doctor himself had recorded, and which the reader may
accept as authentic, is the following: At the head of the doctor's front
stairs stood, and still stands, a tall clock, of early date and stately
presence. A middle-aged visitor, noticing it as he entered the front
door, remarked that he should feel a great unwillingness to pass that
clock. He could not go near one of those tall timepieces without a
profound agitation, which he dreaded to undergo. This very singular
idiosyncrasy he attributed to a fright when he was an infant in the arms
of his nurse.

She was standing near one of those tall clocks, when