Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/609

Rh it into her forearm for over half an inch. Very little blood appeared, as I had suggested, and she felt nothing. In fact, after the experiments were over she did not know anything about the wound. Taking a glass of water, I told her it was whiskey. She took a little with some show of difficulty in swallowing and when I told her to walk, about the room, she reeled around as though she were overcome by the' liquor. I then procured some salt, telling her it was sugar and that it would cure her of her dizziness immediately. She took the salt, a half teaspoonful, said it tasted sweet, asked for more, and was entirely herself again. Finally I placed her between two people putting her head on one's lap and her feet on the other's. She became cataleptic on my suggestion and when two hundred and fifty pounds were put on her body she sustained them very readily.

Before she awakened, I gave her three suggestions: (1) That as soon as she awoke she would go into the front room and lie down on the sofa for a few minutes; (2) that she would go up to her parents and tell them that she was never going to bite her nails again; and (3) that two weeks from that night she would sit down after supper and write me a letter, thanking me for what I had done. All these suggestions were carried into effect.

On Monday, December 9, two weeks and a day after the experiment had been made, I received the following letter:

Not until after the letter had been sent did she find out that it had been I who prompted her to do it. This young lady has not bitten her finger nails since and is entirely cured.

We have already found the primary cause of the sleep when produced by the tiring of the eyes. The eyelids droop because the muscles become temporarily paralyzed. There is one advantage in placing the hand on top of the head. It is that it rolls the eyeballs upward, thus putting them in a natural position for sleep. The various other processes after the sleep has been produced are all dependent on the workings of the nervous system. Let us first try to explain the cataleptic state—how it is that the arm becomes so rigid that the bones can be broken before the arm will bend. The most plausible explanation to my mind is that impulses are sent from the brain which make one set of muscles counteract the influence of another set. For