details, with the full names and dates and references, will be found in
the larger report of these occurrences that was laid before the Society
for the Investigation of Abnormal Phenomena. The singular transposition of
Plattner's right and left sides was scarcely observed for the first day or
so, and then first in connection with his disposition to write from right
to left across the blackboard. He concealed rather than ostended this
curious confirmatory circumstance, as he considered it would unfavourably
affect his prospects in a new situation. The displacement of his heart was
discovered some months after, when he was having a tooth extracted under
anaesthetics. He then, very unwillingly, allowed a cursory surgical
examination to be made of himself, with a view to a brief account in the
_Journal of Anatomy_. That exhausts the statement of the material
facts; and we may now go on to consider Plattner's account of the matter.

But first let us clearly differentiate between the preceding portion of
this story and what is to follow. All I have told thus far is established
by such evidence as even a criminal lawyer would approve. Every one of the
witnesses is still alive; the reader, if he have the leisure, may hunt the
lads out to-morrow, or even brave the terrors of the redoubtable Lidgett,
and cross-examine and trap and test to his heart's content; Gottfried
Plattner himself, and his twisted heart and his three photographs, are
producible. It may be taken as proved that he did disappear for nine days
as the consequence of an explosion; that he returned almost as violently,
under circumstances in their nature annoying to Mr. Lidgett, whatever the
details of those circumstances may be; and that he returned inverted, just
as a reflection returns from a mirror. From the last fact, as I have
already stated, it follows almost inevitably that Plattner, during those
nine days, must have been in some state of existence altogether out of
space. The evidence to these statements is, indeed, far stronger than that
upon which most murderers are hanged. But for his own particular account
of where he had been, with its confused explanations and wellnigh
self-contradictory details, we have only Mr. Gottfried Plattner's word. I
do not wish to discredit that, but I must point out--what so many writers
upon obscure psychic phenomena fail to do--that we are passing here from
the practically undeniable to that kind of matter which any reasonab