when
caught. Whether this is to be compared to hypnotism is doubtful. Other
animals, called hibernating, sleep for months with no other food than
their fat, but this, again, can hardly be called hypnotism.

CHAPTER XI.

A Scientific Explanation of Hypnotism.--Dr. Hart's Theory.

In the introduction to this book the reader will find a summary of the
theories of hypnotism. There is no doubt that hypnotism is a complex
state which cannot be explained in an offhand way in a sentence or two.
There are, however, certain aspects of hypnotism which we may suppose
sufficiently explained by certain scientific writers on the subject.

First, what is the character of the delusions apparently created in the
mind of a person in the hypnotic condition by a simple word of mouth
statement, as when a physician says, "Now, I am going to cut your leg
off, but it will not hurt you in the least," and the patient suffers
nothing?

In answer to this question, Professor William James of Harvard College,
one of the leading authorities on the scientific aspects of psychical
phenomena in this country, reports the following experiments:

"Make a stroke on a paper or blackboard, and tell the subject it is not
there, and he will see nothing but the clean paper or board. Next, he
not looking, surround the original stroke with other strokes exactly
like it, and ask him what he sees. He will point out one by one the new
strokes and omit the original one every time, no matter how numerous the
next strokes may be, or in what order they are arranged. Similarly, if
the original single line, to which he is blind, be doubled by a prism of
sixteen degrees placed before one of his eyes (both being kept open), he
will say that he now sees one stroke, and point in the direction in
which lies the image seen through the prism.

"Another experiment proves that he must see it in order to ignore it.
Make a red cross, invisible to the hypnotic subject, on a sheet of white
paper, and yet cause him to look fixedly at a dot on the paper on or
near the red cross; he wills on transferring his eye to the blank sheet,
see a bluish-green after image of the cross. This proves that it has
impressed his sensibility. He has felt but not perceived it. He had
actually ignored it; refused to recognize it, as it were."

Dr. Ernest Hart, an English writer, in an article in the British Medical
Journal, gives a general explanation of the phenomena of hypnotism which
we may a