The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

* Of. Ribot's Diseases of Memory for cases. See also a large number of them in Forbes Winslow's Obscure Diseases of the Braiu and Mind, chapters XIII-XYII. you rescue them from their ' dissociated ' and split-off con dition, and make them rejoin the other sensibilities and memories — she is a different person. As said above (p. 203), the hypnotic trance is one method of restoring sensibility in hysterics. But one day when the hysteric anaesthetic named Lucie was already in the hypnotic trance, M. Janet for a certain reason continued to make passes over her for a full half-hour as if she were not already asleep, The re sult was to throw her into a sort of syncope from which, after half an hour, she revived in a second somnambulic con dition entirely unlike that which had characterized her thitherto — different sensibilities, a different memory, a dif ferent person, in short. In the waking state the poor young woman was anaesthetic all over, nearly deaf, and with a badly contracted field of vision. Bad as it was, however, sight was her best sense, and she used it as a guide in all her movements. With her eyes bandaged she became en tirely helpless, and like other persons of a similar sort whose cases have been recorded, she almost immediately fell asleep in consequence of the withdrawal of her last sensorial stimulus. M. Janet calls this waking or primary (one can hardly in such a connection say 'normal ') state by the name of Lucie 1. In Lucie 2, her first sort of hypnotic trance, the anaesthesias were diminished but not removed. In the deeper trance, ' Lucie 3,' brought about as just de scribed, no trace of them remained. Her sensibility became perfect, and instead of being an extreme example of the ' visual ' type, she was transformed into what in Prof. Charcot's terminology is known as a motor. That is to say, that whereas when awake she had thought in visual terms exclusively, and could imagine things only by remem bering how they looked, now in this deeper trance her thoughts and memories seemed to M.

Janet to be largely composed of images of movement and of touch. Having discovered this deeper trance and change of personality in Lucie, M. Janet naturally became eager to find it in his other subjects. He found it in Rose, in Marie, and in Leonie ; and his brother, Dr. Jules Janet, who was interne at the Salpetriere Hospital, found it in the celebrated subject Wit .... whose trances had been studied for years by the various doctors of that institution without any of them having happened to awaken this very peculiar indi viduality.*

With the return of all the sensibilities in the deeper trance, these subjects turned, as it were, into normal persons. Their memories in particular grew more exten sive, and hereupon M. Janet spins a theoretic generaliza tion. When a certain kind of sensation, he says, is abol ished in an hysteric patient, there is also abolished along with it aU recollection of past sensations of that kind. If, for ex ample, hearing be the anaesthetic sense, the patient becomes unable even to imagine sounds and voices, and has to speak (when speech is still possible) by means of motor or articulatory cues. If the motor sense be abolished, the pa tient must will the movements of his limbs by first defining them to his mind in visual terms, and must innervate his voice by premonitory ideas of the way in which the words are going to sound. The practical consequences of this law would be great, for all experiences belonging to a sphere of sensibility which afterwards became anaesthetic, as, for example, touch, would have been stored away and remembered in tactile terms, and would be incontinently forgotten as soon as the cutaneous and muscular sensibility should come to be cut out in the course of disease. Memory of them would be restored again, on the other hand, so soon as the sense of touch came back. Now, in the hysteric subjects on whom M. Janet experi mented, touch did come back in the state of trance. The result was that all sorts of memories, absent in the ordinary Condition, came back too, and they could then go back and explain the origin of many otherwise inexplicable things in their life.

One stage in the great convulsive crisis of hystoro-epilepsy, for example, is what French writers call the phase des attitudes passionelles, in which the patient, without speaking or giving any account of herself, will go through the outward movements of fear, anger, or some other emo tional state of mind. Usually this phase is, with each * See the interesting account by M. J. Janet in the Revue Scientifique. May 19, 1888. patient, a thing so stereotyped as to seem automatic, and doubts have even been expressed as to whether any con sciousness exists whilst it lasts. When, however, the patient Lucie's tactile sensibility came back in the deeper trance, she explained the origin of her hysteric crisis in a great fright which she had had when a child, on a day when certain men, hid behind the curtains, had jumped out upon her ; she told how she went through this scene again in all her crises ; she told of her sleep-walking fits through the house when a child, and how for several months she had been shut in a dark room because of a disorder of the eyes. All these were things of which she recollected no thing when awake, because they were records of experiences mainly of motion and of touch.

But M. Janet's subject Leonie is interesting, and shows best how with the sensibilities and motor impulses the memories and character will change. " This woman, whose life sounds more like an improbable romance than a genuine history, has had attacks of natural somnambulism since the age of three years. She has been hypnotized constantly by all sorts of persons from the age of sixteen upwards, and she is now forty-five. "Whilst her normal life developed in one way in the midst of her poor country surroundings, her second life was passed in drawing-rooms and doctors' offices, and naturally took an entirely different direction. To day, when in her normal state, this poor peasant woman is a serious and rather sad person, calm and slow, very mild with every one, and extremely timid : to look at her one would never suspect the personage which she contains. But hardly is she put to sleep hypnotically when a metamorphosis occurs. Her face is no longer the same. She keeps her eyes closed, it is true, but the acuteness of her other senses supplies their place. She is gay, noisy, restless, sometimes insupportably so. She remains good-natured, but has acquired a singular tendency to irony and sharp jesting. Nothing is more curious than to hear her after a sitting when she has received a visit from strangers who wished to see her asleep. She gives a word-portrait of them, apes their manners, pretends to know their little ridiculous aspects and passions, and for each invents a romance. To this character must be added the posses sion of an enormous number of recollections, whose existence she doe? not even suspect when awake, for her amnesia is then complete. . . . She refuses the name of Leonie and takes that of Leontine (Leonie 21 to which her first magnetizers had accustomed her. ' That good woman is not myself,' she says, 'she is too stupid!' To herself, Leontine or Leonie 2, she attributes all the sensations and all the actions, in a wor<J all the conscious experiences which she has undergone in somnambulism,

and knits them together to make the history of her already long life. To Leonie 1 [as M. Janet calls the waking woman] on the other hand, she exclusively ascribes the events lived through in waking hours. I was at first struck by an important exception to the rule, and was disposed to think that there might be something arbitrary in this partition of her recollections. In the normal state Leonie has a husband and chil dren ; but Leonie 2, the somnambulist, whilst acknowledging the children as her own, attributes the husband to 'the other.' This choice, was perhaps explicable, but it followed no rule. It was not till later that J learned that her magnetizers in early days, as audacious as certain hypnotizers of recent date, had somnambulized her for her first accoucheme?its, and that she had lapsed into that state spontaneously in the later ones. Leonie 2 was thus quite right in ascribing to herself the children— it was she who had had them, and the rule that her first trance-state forms a different personality was not broken. But it is the same with her second or deepest state of trance. When after the renewed passes, syncope, etc., she reaches the condition which I have called Leonie 3, she is another person still. Serious and grave, instead of being a restless child, she speaks slowly and moves but little. Again she separates herself from the waking Leonie 1. 'A good but rather stupid woman,' she says, ' and not me.' And she aiso separates herself from Leonie 2 : 4 How can you see anything of me in that crazy crea ture ? ' she says. * Fortunately I am nothing for her.' "

Leonie 1 knows only of herself ; Leonie 2, of herself and of Leonie 1 ; Leonie 3 knows of herself and of both the others. Leonie 1 has a visual consciousness ; Leonie 2 has one both visual and auditory ; in Leonie 3 it is at once visual, auditory, and tactile. Prof. Janet thought at first that he was Leonie 3's discoverer. But she told him that she had been frequently in that condition 'before. A former magnetizer had hit upon her just as M. Janet had, in seeking by means of passes to deepen the sleep of Leonie 2.

"This resurrection of a somnambulic personage who had been extinct for twenty years is curious enough ; and in speaking to Leonie 8, I naturally now adopt the name of Leonore which was given her by her first master." The most carefully studied case of multiple personality is that of the hysteric youth Louis V. aboiit whom MM. Bourru and Burot have written a book.* The symptoms are too intricate to be reproduced here with detail. Suffice it that Louis V. had led an irregular life, in the army, in

hospitals, and in houses of correction, and had had numer ous hysteric anaesthesias, paralyses, and contractures attack ing him differently at different times and when he lived at different places. At eighteen, at an agricultural House of Correction he was bitten by a viper, which brought on a convulsive crisis and left both of his legs paralyzed for three years. During this condition he was gentle, moral, and industrious. But suddenly at last, after a long con vulsive seizure, his paralysis disappeared, and with it his memory for all the time during which it had endured. His character also changed : he became quarrelsome, glutton ous, impolite, stealing his comrades' wine, and money from an attendant, and finally escaped from the establishment and fought furiously when he was overtaken and caught. Later, when he first fell under the observation of the authors, his right side was half paralyzed and insensible, and his character intolerable ; the application of metals transferred the paralysis to the left side, abolished his recollections of the other condition, and carried him psy chically back to the hospital of Bicetre where he had been treated for a similar physical condition. His character, opinions, education, all underwent a concomitant trans formation. He was no longer the personage of the moment before. It appeared ere long that any present nervous dis order in him could be temporarily removed by metals, magnets, electric or other baths, etc. ; and that any past disorder could be brought back by hypnotic suggestion. He also went through a rapid spontaneous repetition of his series of past disorders after each of the convulsive attacks which occurred in him at intervals. It was observed that each physical state in which he found himself, excluded certain memories and brought with it a definite modifica tion of character.

"The law of these changes," say the authors, "is quite clear. There exist precise, constant, and necessary relations between the bodily and the mental state, such that it is impossible to modify the one without modifying the other in a parallel fashion." * * Op. cit. p. 84. In this work and in Dr. Azam's (cited on a previous page), as well as in Prof. Th. Ribot's Maladies de la Personnalite (1885), the The case of this proteiform individual would seem, then, nicely to corroborate M. P. Janet's law that anaesthesias and gaps in memory go together. Coupling Janet's law with Locke's that changes of memory bring changes of personal ity, we should have an apparent explanation of some cases at least of alternate personality. But mere anaesthesia does not sufficiently explain the changes of disposition, which are probably due to modifications in the perviousuess of motor and associative paths, co-ordinate with those of the sensorial paths rather than consecutive upon them. And indeed a glance at other cases than M. Janet's own, suffices to show us that sensibility and memory are not coupled in any invariable way.* M. Janet's law, true of his own cases, does not seem to hold good in all.

Of course it is mere guesswork to speculate on what may be the cause of the amnesias which lie at the bottom of changes in the Self. Changes of blood-supply have naturally been invoked. Alternate action of the two hemi spheres was long ago proposed by Dr. Wigan in his book on the Duality of the Mind. I shall revert to this expla nation after considering the third class of alterations of the Self, those, namely, which 1 have called ' possessions.'

I have myself become quite recently acquainted with the subject of a case of alternate personality of the * ambureader will find information and references relative to the other known cases of the kind. * His own brother's subject Wit. . . . .although in her anaesthetic waking state she recollected nothing of either of her trances, yet remembered her deeper trance (in which her sensibilities became perfect— see above, p. 207) when she was in her lighter trance. Nevertheless in the latter she was as anaesthetic as when awake. (Loc. cit. p. 619.)— It does not appear that there was any important difference in the sensibility of Felida X. between her two states— as far as one can judge from M. Azam's account she was to some degree anaesthetic in both (op. cit. pp. 71, 96).— In the case of double personality reported by M. Dufay (Revue Scientifique, vol. xvin. p. 69), the memory seems to have been best in the more anaesthetic condition. — Hypnotic subjects made blind do not necessarily lose their visua1 ideas. It appears, then, both that amnesias may occur without anaesthesias, and anaes thesias without amnesias, though they may also occur in combination Hypnotic subjects made blind by suggestion will tell you that they clearlj imagine the things which they can v longer see

latory ' sort, who has given me permission to name him in these pages.* The Rev. Ansel Bourne, of Greene, R. I., was brought up to th« trade of a carpenter; but, in consequence of a sudden temporary loss, of sight and hearing under very peculiar circumstances, he became con verted from Atheism to Christianity just before his thirtieth year, and has since that time for the most part lived the life of an itinerant preacher. He has been subject to headaches and temporary fits of de pression of spirits during most of his life, and has had a few fits of un consciousness lasting an hour or less. He also has a region of somewhat diminished cutaneous sensibility on the left thigh. Otherwise his, health is good, and his muscular strength and endurance excellent. He is of a firm and self-reliant disposition, a man whose yea is yea and his nay, nay; and his character for uprightness is such in the com munity that no person who knows him will for a moment admit tht, possibility of his case not being perfectly genuine.

On January 17, 1887, he drew 551 dollars from a bank in Provi dence with which to pay for a certain lot of land in Greene, paid certain bills, and got into a Pawtucket horse-car. This is the last incident which he remembers. He did not return home that day, and nothing was heard of him for two months. He was published in the papers as missing, and foul play being suspected, the police sought in vain his whereabouts. On the morning of March 14th, however, at Norristown, Pennsylvania, a man calling himself A. J. Brown, who had rented a small shop six weeks previously, stocked it with station ery, confectionery, fruit and small articles, and carried on his quiet trade without seeming to any one unnatural or eccentric, woke up in a fright and called in the people of the house to tell him where he was. He said that his name was Ansel Bourne, that he was entirely igno rant of Norristown, that he knew nothing of shop-keeping, and that the last thing he remembered — it seemed only yesterday — was drawing the money from the bank, etc., in Providence. He would not be lieve that two months had elapsed. The people of the house thought him insane ; and so, at first, did Dr. Louis H. Read, whom they called in to see him. But on telegraphing to Providence, confirmatory mes sages came, and presently his nephew, Mr. Andrew Harris, arrived npon the scene, made everything straight, and took him home. He was rery weak, having lost apparently over twenty pounds of flesh during his escapade, and had such a horror of the idea of the candy-store that he refused to set foot in it again.

The first two weeks of the period remained unaccounted for, as he had no memory, after he had once resumed his normal personality, of any part of the time, and no one who knew him seems to have seen him * A full account of the case, by Mr. R. Hodgson, will be found in the Proceeding of the Society for Psychical Research for 1891. after he left home. The remarkable part of the change is, of course, the peculiar occupation which the so-called Brown indulged in. Mr. Bourne has never in his life had the slightest contact with trade. ' Brown ' was described by the neighbors as taciturn, orderly in his habits, and in no way queer. He went to Philadelphia several times; replenished his stock ; cooked for himself in the back shop, where he also slept ; went regularly to church ; and once at a prayer-meeting made what was considered by the hearers a good address, in the course of which he related an incident which he had witnessed in his natural state of Bourne.

This was all that was known of the case up to June 1890, when I induced Mr. Bourne to submit to hypnotism, so as to see whether, in the hypnotic trance, his l Brown ' memory would not come back. It did so with surprising readiness ; so much so indeed that it proved quite im possible to make him whilst in the hypnosis remember any of the facts of his normal life. He had heard of Ansel Bourne, but " didn't know as he had ever met the man." When confronted with Mrs. Bourne he said that he had " never seen the woman before," etc. On the other hand, he told of his peregrinations during the lost fortnight,* and gave all sorts of details about the Norristown episode. The whole thing was prosaic enough ; and the Brown-personality seems to be nothing but a rather shrunken, dejected, and amnesic extract of Mr. Bourne himself. He gives no motive for the wandering except that there was ' trouble back there ' and he * wanted rest.' During the trance he looks old, the corners of his mouth are drawn down, his voice is slow and weak, and he sits screening his eyes and trying vainly to remember what lay before and after the two months of the Brown experience. " I'm all hedged in," he says: " I can't get out at either end. I don't kno\\ what set me down in that Pawtucket horse-car, and I don't know how I ever left that store, or what became of it." His eyes are practically normal, and all his sensibilities (save for tardier response) about the same in hypnosis as in waking. I had hoped by suggestion, etc., to run the two personalities into one, and make the memories con tinuous, but no artifice would avail to accomplish this, and Mr. Bourne's skull to-day still covers two distinct personal selves.

'The case (whether it contain an epileptic element or not) should apparently be classed as one of spontaneous hypnotic trance, persisting for two months. The peculiarity of it is that nothing else like it ever occurred in the man's life, and that no eccentricity of character came * He had spent an afternoon in Boston, a night in New York, an after noon in Newark, and ten days or more in Philadelphia, first in a certain hotel and next in a certain boarding-house, making no acquaintances, 'rest ing,' reading, and 'looking round.' I have unfortunately been unable to get independent corroboration of these details, as the hotel registers are destroyed, and the boarding-house named by him has been pulled down. He forgets the name of the two Jafl"w who kept it.

out. In most similar cases, the attacks recur, and the sensibilities and conduct markedly change. * 3. In ' mediumships ' or 'possessions ' the invasion and the passing away of the secondary state are both relatively abrupt, and the duration of the state is usually short — i.e., from a few minutes to a few hours. Whenever the second ary state is well developed no memory for aught that hap pened during it remains after the primary consciousness comes back. The subject during the secondary conscious ness speaks, writes, or acts as if animated by a foreign per son, and often names this foreign person and gives his history. In old times the foreign ' control ' was usually a demon, and iz so now in communities which favor that be lief. With us In gives himself out at the worst for an Indian or other grotesquely speaking but harmless person age. Usually li: purports to be the spirit of a dead per son known or unknown to tnose present, and the subject is then wiiat we call c, c medium.' Mediumistic possession in all its grades seems to form a perfectly natural special type of alternate personality, and the susceptibility to it in some form is by no means an uncommon gift, in persons who have no other obvious nervous anomaly. The phenomena are very intricate, and are only ~'us^ beginning to be studied in a proper scientific way. The lowest phase of mediumship is automatic writing, and the lowest gro.de of that is where the Subject knows what words are coming, but feels impelled to write them as if from without. Then comes writing unconsciously, even whilst engaged ii. reading or talk. Inspirational speaking, playing on musical instru ments, etc., also belong to the relatively lower phases of possession, in which the normal self is not excluded from conscious participation in the performance, though their initiative seems to come from elsewhere. In the highest phase the trance is complete, the voice, language, and

* The details of the case, it will be seen, are all compatible with simula tion. I can only say of that, that no one who has examined Mr. Bourne (including Dr. Read, Dr. Weir Mitchell, Dr. Guy Hiusdale, and Mr. R. Hodgson) practically doubts his ingrained honesty, nor, so far as I can discover, do any of his personal acquaintances indulge in a sceptical everything are changed, and there is no after-memory whatever until the next trance comes. One curious thing about trance-utterances is their generic similarity in differ ent individuals. The ' control ' here in America is either a grotesque, slangy, and flippant personage ('Indian' con trols, calling the ladies 'squaws,' the men 'braves,' the house a ' wigwam,' etc., etc., are excessively common) ; or, if he ventures on higher intellectual flights, he abounds in a curiously vague optimistic philosophy-and-water, in which phrases about spirit, harmony, beauty, law, progression, development, etc., keep recurring. It seems exactly as if one author composed more than half of the trance-mes sages, no matter by whom they are uttered. Whether all sub-conscious selves are peculiarly susceptible to a certain stratum of the Zeitgeist, and get their inspiration from it, I know not ; but this is obviously the case with the second ary selves which become ' developed ' in spiritualist circles. There the beginnings of the medium trance are indistin guishable from effects of hypnotic suggestion. The sub ject assumes the role of a medium simply because opinion expects it of him under the conditions which are present ; and carries it out with a feebleness or a vivacity propor tionate to his histrionic gifts. But the odd thing is that persons unexposed to spiritualist traditions will so often act in the same way when they become entranced, speak in the name of the departed, go through the motions of their several death-agonies, send messages about their happy home in the summer-land, and describe the ailments of those present. I have no theory to publish of these cases, several of which I have personally seen.

As an example of the automatic writing performances I will quote from an account of his own case kindly furnished me by Mr. Sidney Dean of Warren, B. I., member of Con gress from Connecticut from 1855 to 1859, who has been all his life a robust and active journalist, author, and man of affairs. He has for many years been a writing subject, and has a large collection of manuscript automatically pro duced. "Some of it," be writes us, " is in hieroglyph, or strange compound ed arbitrary characters, each series possessing a seeming unitv in general

design or cnaraeter, followed by what purports to be a translation or rendering into molhei English. I never attempted the seemingly impos sible feat of copying the characters. They were cut with the precision of a graver's ool, and generally with a single rapid stroke of the pen cil. Many languages, some obsolete and passed from history, are pro fessedly given. To see them would satisfy you that no one could copy them except by tracing. "These, however, are but a small part of the phenomena. The ' automatic ' has given place to the impressional, and when the work is in progress I am in the normal condition, and seemingly two minds, in telligences, persons, are practically engaged. The writing is in my own hand but the dictation not of my owTn mind and will, but that of an other, upon subjects of which I can have no knowledge and hardly a theory ; and I, myself, consciously criticise the thought, fact, mode of expressing it, etc., while the hand is recording the subject-matter and even the words impressed to be written. If I refuse to write the sen tence, or even the word, the impression instantly ceases, and my wil lingness must be mentally expressed before the work is resumed, and it is resumed at the point of cessation, even if it should be in the middle of a sentence. Sentences are commenced without knowledge of mine as to their subject or ending. In fact, I have never known in advance the subject of disquisition.

"There is in progress now, at uncertain times, not subject to my v.'ill, a series of twenty-four chapters upon the scientific features of life, moral, spiritual, eternal. Seven have already been written in the man ner indicated. These were preceded by twenty-four chapters relating generally to the life beyond material death, its characteristics, etc. Each chapter is signed by the name of some person who has lived on earth, — some with whom I have been personally acquainted, others known in history. ... I know nothing of the alleged authorship of any chapter until it is completed and the name impressed and ap pended. ... I am interested not only in the reputed authorship,—- of which I have nothing corroborative, — but in the philosophy taught, of which I was in ignorance until these chapters appeared. From my standpoint of life — which has been that of biblical orthodoxy — the philosophy is new, seems to be reasonable, and is logically put. I con fess to an inability to successfully controvert it to my own satisfaction.

"It is an intelligent ego who writes, or else the influence assumes individuality, which practically makes of the influence a personality. It is not myself ; of that I am conscious at every step of the process. I have also traversed the whole field of the claims of ' unconscious cere bration,' so called, so far as I am competent to critically examine it, and it fails, as a theory, in numberless points, when applied to this strange work through me. It would be far more reasonable and satisfactory for me to accept the silly hypothesis of re-incarnation, — the old doctrine of metempsychosis,— as taught by some spiritualists to-day, and to believe that I lived a former life here, and that once in a while it dominates mv

intellectual powers, and writes chapters upon the philosophy of life, o* opens a post-office for spirits to drop their effusions, and have them put into English script. No ; the easiest and most natural solution to me is to admit the claim made, i.e., that it is a decarnated intelligence who writes. But who ? that is the question. The names of scholars and thinkers who once lived are affixed to the most ungrammatical and weakest of bosh. . . " It seems reasonable to me — upon the hypothesis that it is a per son using another's mind or brain— that there must be more or less of that other's style or tone incorporated in the message, and that to the unseen personality, i.e., the power which impresses, the thought, the fact, or the philosophy, and not the style or tone, belongs. For in stance, while the influence is impressing my brain with the greatest force and rapidity, so that my pencil fairly flies over the paper to record the thoughts, I am conscious that, in many cases, the vehicle of the thought, i.e., the language, is very natural and familiar to me, as if, somehow, my personality as a writer was getting mixed up with the message. And, again, the style, language, everything, is entirely foreign to my c^n style.1'

I am myself persuaded by abundant acquaintance with the trances of one medium that the ' control ' may be alto gether different from any possible waking self of the person. In the case I have in mind, it professes to be a certain de parted French doctor ; and is, I am convinced, acquainted with facts about the circumstances, and the living and dead relatives and acquaintances, of numberless sitters whom the medium never met before, and of whom she has never heard the names. I record my bare opinion here unsupported by the evidence, not, of course, in order to convert anyone to my view, but because I am persuaded that a serious study of these trance-phenomena is one of the greatest needs of psychology, and think that my personal confession may possibly draw a reader or two into a field which the soidisant ' scientist ' usually refuses to explore.

Many persons have found evidence conclusive to their minds that in some cases the control is really the departed spirit whom it pretends to be. The phenomena shade off so gradually into cases where this is obviously ab surd, that the presumption (quite apart from a priori ' scien tific ' prejudice) is great against its being true. The case of Lurancy Yennum is perhaus as extreme a case of ' possession ' of the modern sort as one can find.* Lurancy was a young girl of fourteen, living with her parents at Watseka, 111., who (after various distressing hysterical disorders and spontaneous trances, during which she was possessed by de parted spirits of a more or less grotesque sort) finally declared herself to be animated by the spirit of Mary Roff (a neighbor's daughter, who had died in an insane asylum twelve years before) and insisted on being sent ' home' to Mr. BofFs house. After a week of ' homesickness ' and impor tunity on her part, her parents agreed, and the Roffs, who pitied her, and who were spiritualists into the bargain, took her in. Once there, she seems to have convinced the family that their dead Mary had exchanged habitations with Lu rancy. Lurancy was said to be temporarily in heaven, and Mary's spirit now controlled her organism, and lived again in her former earthly home.

"The girl, now in ner new home, seemed perfectly happy and con tent, knowing every person and everything that Mary knew when in her original body, twelve to twenty-five years ago, recognizing and call ing by name those who were friends and neighbors of the family from 1852 to 1865, when Mary died, calling attention to scores, yes, hundreds of incidents that transpired during her natural life. During all the period of her sojourn at Mr. Roffs she had no knowledge of, and did not recognize, any of Mr. Vennum's family, their friends or neighbors, yet Mr. and Mrs. Venn urn and their children visited her and Mr. Roff's people, she being introduced to them as to any strangers. After fre quent visits, and hearing them often and favorably spoken of, she learned to love them as acquaintances, and visited them with Mrs. Roff three times. From day to day she appeared natural, easy, affable, and industrious, attending diligently and faithfully to her household duties, assisting in the general work of the family as a faithful, prudent daugh ter might be supposed to do, singing, reading, or conversing as oppor tunity offered, upon all matters of private or general interest to the family.

The so-called Mary whilst at the KofiV would sometimes * go back to heaven,' and leave the body in a ' quiet trance,' i.e., without the original personality of Luraucy returning. After eight or nine weeks, however, the memory and manner of Lurancy would sometimes partially, but not en tirely, return for a few minutes. Once Lurancy seems to * The Watseka Wonder, by E. W. Stevens. Chicago, Religio-Philosophical Publishing House, 1887. have taken full possession for a short time. At last, after some fourteen weeks, conformably to the prophecy which ' Mary ' had made when she first assumed ' control,' she departed definitively and the Lurancy-consciousness came back for good. Mr. Roff writes :

" She wanted me to take her home, which I did. She called me Mi. Roff, and talked with me as a young girl would, not being acquainted. I asked her how things appeared to her — if they seemed natural. She said it seemed like a dream to her. She met her parents and brothers in a very affectionate manner, hugging and kissing each one in tears of gladness. She clasped her arms around her father's neck a long time, fairly smothering him with kisses. I saw her father just now (eleven o'clock). He says she has been perfectly natural, and seems entirely well."

Lurancy's mother writes, a couple of months later, that she was " perfectly and entirely well and natural. For two or three weeks after her return home, she seemed a little strange to what she had been before she was taken sick last summer, but only, perhaps, the natural change that had taken place with the girl, and except it seemed to her as though she had been dreaming or sleeping, etc. Lurancy has been smarter, more intelligent, more industrious, more womanly, and more polite than before. We give the credit of her complete cure and restora tion to her family, to Dr. E. W. Stevens, and Mr. and Mrs. Roff, by their obtaining her removal to Mr. Roff's, where her cure was perfected. We firmly believe that, had she remained at home, she would have died, or we would have been obliged to send her to the insane asylum ; and if so, that she would have died there ; and further, that I could not have lived but a short time with the care and trouble devolving on me. Several of the relatives of Lurancy, including ourselves, now believe she was cured by spirit power, and that Mary Roff controlled the girl."