THE ''JUMPERS'' OF MAINE. 175 



nervous disease. It can not, therefore, be said to be in any sense a 

 disease of nervous debility. Those who suffer most from it are the 

 very opposite of neurasthenics or anaemics ; they have none of the symp- 

 toms detailed in my work on nervous exhaustion ; they are full-blooded 

 and strong-nerved, capable of working hard and long at the most toil- 

 some service, and will hold themselves up full and sturdy and enduring, 

 side by side with the hardiest men in the nation. Like " servant-girl 

 hysteria," and like certain forms of chorea or "jerks," as they are called, 

 which appear or have appeared in certain religious revivals, like the 

 " Holy Rollers " * as they were called in the religious revivals of north- 

 ern New Hampshire, these Jumpers are contributions to psychology 

 more than to pathology. Far out of the range of the aided senses, far 

 beyond the reach of the microscope, or perhaps of the spectroscope, 

 there may be molecular changes or disturbances which manifest them- 

 selves in these jumpings and strikings and throwings as a result and cor- 

 relative. But for the present, possibly for all time, we can only study 

 this subject psychologically ; we can only approach it satisfactorily 

 from the psychological side. Only those who clearly recognize the 

 two distinct types of hysteria, the neurasthenic or anaemic form, which 

 may be called physical hysteria, and the mental or psychical form, 

 which may be called psychical hysteria, can understand the nature of 

 this peculiar malady of the Jumpers ; but those who do comprehend 

 and recognize these two types of hysteria will have little difficulty in 

 comprehending the general nature of this jumping and its position 

 among the neuroses. Some of the cases of hysteria major on which 

 Charcot has experimented with his metals and magnets belong, as I 

 am persuaded from personal observation, to psychical or mental rather 

 than to physical diseases. I can find in the families of those who 

 suffer from jumping no proof of any form of functional or organic 

 nervous disease. 



Jumping is, therefore, a trancoidal condition, exhibiting a part of 

 the phenomena of trance, and bearing the same relation to trance that 

 certain epileptoidiil conditions bear to epilepsy. 



Although the phenomena exhibited by the Jumpers are analogous 

 to those of mesmeric trance, of mental hysteria of the " Jerkers " and 

 " Holy Rollers " in revivals, they yet differ from all these and all allied 

 forms of nervous disorder in these two respects : 



1. The momentary character of the manifestations. 



In but a second or so all the acts of the Jumper striking, throw- 

 ing, dropping, crying, jerking, or jumping are over completely, and 

 he is about in the same condition as before he was surprised. The ex- 

 plosion of the Jumper, like the explosion of a revolver, is sudden and 

 instantaneous ; and like a revolver, also, the Jumper is at once ready 

 for a new explosion on proper excitation. If we look at a Jumper five 



* So called because they rolled over and over on the floor while under religious ex- 

 citement. 



