miracle, it is exceedingly hard to suggest.

In one way, of course, these facts might be explicable on the supposition
that Plattner has undertaken an elaborate mystification, on the strength
of his heart's displacement. Photographs may be faked, and left-handedness
imitated. But the character of the man does not lend itself to any such
theory. He is quiet, practical, unobtrusive, and thoroughly sane, from the
Nordau standpoint. He likes beer, and smokes moderately, takes walking
exercise daily, and has a healthily high estimate of the value of his
teaching. He has a good but untrained tenor voice, and takes a pleasure in
singing airs of a popular and cheerful character. He is fond, but not
morbidly fond, of reading,--chiefly fiction pervaded with a vaguely pious
optimism,--sleeps well, and rarely dreams. He is, in fact, the very last
person to evolve a fantastic fable. Indeed, so far from forcing this story
upon the world, he has been singularly reticent on the matter. He meets
enquirers with a certain engaging--bashfulness is almost the word, that
disarms the most suspicious. He seems genuinely ashamed that anything so
unusual has occurred to him.

It is to be regretted that Plattner's aversion to the idea of post-mortem
dissection may postpone, perhaps for ever, the positive proof that his
entire body has had its left and right sides transposed. Upon that fact
mainly the credibility of his story hangs. There is no way of taking a man
and moving him about in space as ordinary people understand space, that
will result in our changing his sides. Whatever you do, his right is still
his right, his left his left. You can do that with a perfectly thin and
flat thing, of course. If you were to cut a figure out of paper, any
figure with a right and left side, you could change its sides simply by
lifting it up and turning it over. But with a solid it is different.
Mathematical theorists tell us that the only way in which the right and
left sides of a solid body can be changed is by taking that body clean out
of space as we know it,--taking it out of ordinary existence, that is, and
turning it somewhere outside space. This is a little abstruse, no doubt,
but anyone with any knowledge of mathematical theory will assure the
reader of its truth. To put the thing in technical language, the curious
inversion of Plattner's right and left sides is proof that he has moved
out of our space into what is called the Fourth Dimension, and t