it was necessary to put him to bed,
where he remained, more or less continuously for three months,
awakening gradually, and regaining his normal condition by the middle
of June. He was fed by hand three times daily, was placed on a
night-chair, and with one exception never evacuated in bed. Five months
afterward he showed no signs of relapse. The latest report of a
"sleeping girl" is that of the young Dutch maiden, Maria Cvetskens, of
Stevenswerth, who on December 5, 1895, had been asleep for two hundred
and twenty days. She had been visited by a number of men of good
professional standing who, although differing as to the cause of her
prolonged sleep, universally agreed that there was no deception in the
case. Her parents were of excellent repute, and it had never occurred
to them to make any financial profit out of the unnatural state of
their daughter.

Hypnotism.--The phenomenon of hypnotism was doubtless known to the
Oriental nations, and even to the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, as
well as to other nations since the downfall of the Roman Empire. "The
fakirs of India, the musicians of Persia, the oracles of Greece, the
seers of Rome, the priests and priestesses of Egypt, the monastic
recluses of the Middle Ages, the ecstatics of the seventeenth and early
part of the eighteenth century exhibited many symptoms that were, and
are still, attributed by religious enthusiasts to supernatural
agencies, but which are explainable by what we know of hypnotism. The
Hesychasts of Mount Athos who remained motionless for days with their
gaze directed steadily to the navel; the Taskodrugites who remained
statuesque for a long period with the finger applied to the nose; the
Jogins who could hibernate at will; the Dandins of India who became
cataleptoid by 12,000 repetitions of the sacred word Om; St. Simeon
Stylites who, perched on a lofty pillar, preserved an attitude of
saint-like withdrawal from earthly things for days; and even Socrates,
of whom it was said that he would stand for hours motionless and
wordless--all these are probable instances of autohypnotism." (Gray.)

Hypnotism is spoken of as a morbid mental state artificially produced,
and characterized by perversion or suspension of consciousness, and
abeyance of volition; a condition of suggestibility leads the patient
to yield readily to commands of external sense-impressions, and there
is intense concentration of the mental faculties upon some idea or
feeling. The