and lay her in it. This feeling produced a mental anxiety, which is indescribable. She tried to cry, but her soul was without power, and could not act on her body. She had the contradictory feeling as if she were in her body, and yet not in it, at one and the same time. It was equally impossible for her to stretch out her arm, or to open her eyes, or to cry, although she continually endeavored to do so. The internal anguish of her mind was, however, at its utmost height when the the funeral hymns began to be sung, and when the lid of the coffin was about to be nailed on. The thought that she was to be buried alive, was the one that gave activity to her soul, and caused it to operate on her corporeal frame."*

The following is different from either of the foregoing; I have given it on account of its singularity, although it does not altogether come under the denomination of trance.

"George Grokatzhi, a Polish soldier, deserted from his regiment in the harvest of the year 1677. He was discovered, a few days after, drinking and making merry in a common ale-house. The moment he was apprehended, he was so much terrified, that he gave a loud shriek, and was immediately deprived of the power of speech. When brought to a court martial, it was impossible to make him articulate a word; nay, he then became as immovable as a statue, and appeared not to be

* "Psychological Magazine,” vol. v. part iii. page 15.

conscious of any thing that was going forward. In the prison, to which he was conducted, he neither ate nor drank. The officers and priests at first threatened him, and afterwards endeavored to soothe and calm him, but all their efforts were in vain. He remained senseless and immovable. His irons were struck off, and he was taken out of the prison, but he did not move. Twenty days and nights were passed in this way, during which he took no kind of nourishment: he then gradually sunk and died."*

It would be out of place to enter here into a detail of the medical management of the first mentioned varieties of suspended animation, such as drowning, strangulation, &c., &c.; and with regard to the treatment of trance, properly so called, a very few words will suffice.

If we have reason to suppose that we know the cause of the affection, that, of course, must be removed whenever practicable. We must then employ stimuli to arouse the person from his torpor, such as friction, the application of sternutatories and volatile agents to the nostrils, and electricity. The latter remedy is likely to prove a very powerful one, and should always be had recource to when other means fail. I should think the warm bath might be advantageously employed.. When even these remedies do not succeed, we must trust to time. So long as the body does not run into

* Bonetus, "Medic Septentrion.". lib. i. sec. xvi. cap. 6.

decay, after a case of suspended animation arising without any very obvious cause, interment should not take place; for it is possible that life may exist, although, for the time being, there is every appearance of its utter extinction. By neglecting this rule, a person may be interred alive; nor can there be a doubt that such dreadful mistakes have occasionally been committed, especially in France, where it is customary to inter the body twentyfour hours after death. Decomposition is the only infallible mark that existence is at an end, and that the grave has triumphed.

CHAPTER XIV.

VOLUNTARY WAKING DREAMS.

THE young and the imaginative are those who indulge most frequently in waking dreams. The scenes which life presents do not come up to the desires of the heart; and the pencil of fancy is accordingly employed in depicting others more in harmony with its own designs. Away into the gloomy back-ground goes reality with its stern and forbidding hues, and forward, in colors more dazzling than those of the rainbow, start the bright and airy phantoms of imagination. "How often," observes Dr. Good,* "waking to the roar of the midnight tempest, while dull and gluttonous indolence snores on in happy forgetfulness, does the imagination of those who are thus divinely gifted mount the dizzy chariot of the whirlwind, and picture evils that have no real existence; now figuring to herself some neat and thrifty cottage where virtue delights to reside, she sees it swept away in

* Book of Nature, vol. iii. p. 422.

a moment by the torrent, and despoiled of the little harvest just gathered in; now following the lone traveller in some narrow and venturous pathway, over the edge of the Alpine precipices, where a single slip is instant destruction, she tracks him alone by fitful flashes of lightning; and at length, struck by the flash, she beholds him tumbling headlong from rock to rock, to the bottom of the dread abyss, the victim of a double death. Or possibly she takes her stand on the jutting foreland of some bold terrific coast, and eyes the foundering vessel straight below; she mixes with the spent and despairing crew; she dives into the cabin, and singles out, perhaps from the rest, some lovely maid, who, in all the bloom of recovered beauty, is voyaging back to her native land from the healing airs of a foreign climate, in thought just bounding over the scenes of her youth, or panting in the warm embraces of a father's arms." Such are waking dreams; and there are few who, at some happy moment or other, have not yielded to their influence. Often under the burning clime of India, or upon the lonely banks of the Mississippi, has the stranger let loose the reins of his imagination, calling up before him the mountains of his own beloved country, his native streams, and rocks, and valleys, so vividly, that he was transported back into the midst of them, and lived over again the days of his youth. Or the waking dream may assume a more selfish character. If the individual pines after wealth, his mind may