rce necessary to carry on life for fourteen years without
getting it through food taken into the stomach. But a possibility and a
fact are two very different things, and the admitted possibility has not
yet been shown to be a fact. It is easier--to use the argument of
Hume--for the mind to accept the view that there is deception or error
somewhere, than to believe that a woman, contrary to all human
experience, should live fourteen years without food. Turtles, we know,
will live for months while entirely deprived of nutriment. Many others
of the cold-blooded animals will do the same thing. It is their nature
to do so, and we have experience of the fact, but it is not the nature
of women, so far as we know, and therefore we refuse to accept as true
the stories which are told of their powers in this direction. And our
knowledge is based not only on our daily experience of the wants of
their systems and the examples of starvation which have come to our
knowledge, but also upon the fact that in the many cases of alleged long
abstinence from food that have been investigated, error or deception has
been discovered. Therefore, when it is said that Miss Fancher lives
without food, and has so done for fourteen years, we simply say, "give
us the proofs." Of course the proofs are not given.

How far Miss Fancher is responsible for the assertions that have been
made in regard to her long-continued abstinence I do not know. A
tendency to deception is a notable phenomenon of hysteria, and if she
has led those about her to accept the view that she has existed without
food for years, the circumstance would be in no way remarkable. Other
hysterical women have deceived in the same or in still more astonishing
ways. Or it may be that the amount of food taken being very small,
carelessness or want of exactness has led to the expression that she
lived upon "absolutely nothing," just as we hear the words used every
day by those who have little or no appetite, but who nevertheless do eat
something. Again, a love for the marvellous is so deeply rooted in the
average human mind that it willingly, and to a certain extent
unconsciously, adds to any statement of a remarkable circumstance, till
the latter grows, whilst being repeated, to fabulous dimensions.

But however this may be, whatever the explanation, it is quite certain
that if Miss Fancher has lived fourteen years without food, or even
fourteen months, or weeks, she is a unique psychologi