er's coming to see her the subject's face became highly
colored, and tears appeared on the tips of her eyelashes, without,
however, in any other way disturbing her lethargy.

"Nothing has yet been able to rouse her from this torpor, which will, no
doubt, naturally disappear at a given moment. She will then return to
conscious life as she quitted it. It is probable that she will not
retain any recollection of her present condition, that all notion of
time will fail her, and that she will fancy it is only the day following
her usual nightly slumber, a slumber which, in this case, has been
transformed into a lethargic sleep, without any rigidity of limbs or
convulsions.

"Physically, the sleeper is of a middle size, slender, strong and
pretty, without distinctive characteristic. Mentally, she is lively,
industrious, sometimes whimsical, and subject to slight nervous
attacks."

There is a pretty well-authenticated report of a young girl who, on May
30, 1883, after an intense fright, fell into a lethargic condition which
lasted for four years. Her parents were poor and ignorant, but, as the
fame of the case spread abroad, some physicians went to investigate it
in March, 1887. Her sleep had never been interrupted. On raising the
eyelids, the doctors found the eyes turned convulsively upward, but,
blowing upon them, produced no reflex movement of the lids. Her jaws
were closed tightly, and the attempt to open her mouth had broken off
some of the teeth level with the gums. The muscles contracted at the
least breath or touch, and the arms remained in position when uplifted.
The contraction of the muscles is a sign of the lethargic state, but the
arm, remaining in position, indicates the cataleptic state. The girl was
kept alive by liquid nourishment poured into her mouth.

There are on record a large number of cases of persons who have slept
for several months.

CATALEPSY.

The next higher stage of hypnotism is that of catalepsy. Patients may be
thrown into it directly, or patients in the lethargic state may be
brought into it by lifting the eyelids. It seems that the light
penetrating the eyes, and affecting the brain, awakens new powers, for
the cataleptic state has phenomena quite peculiar to itself.

Nearly all the means for producing hypnotism will, if carried to just
the right degree, produce catalepsy. For instance, besides the fixing
of the eye on a bright object, catalepsy may be produced by a sudden
sound, as