60 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



all directions heightened by flushes of red, green and especially violet. 

 The whole place became vivid and beautiful and the tone and texture 

 of the whitewashed but not very white ceiling was immensely improved. 

 The difference between the room as I saw it then and the appearance 

 it usually presents was the difference one may often observe between 

 the picture of a room and the actual room. The shadows I saw were the 

 shadows that the artist put in, and that are not visible in the actual 

 object under ordinary conditions of casual inspection. At the same time 

 shadows chased each other across the walls, never becoming actual 

 visions. 



"I wished to ascertain how the subdued and steady electric light 

 could influence the phenomena, and passed into the next room. Here 

 the rich shadows which were evidently largely due to the stimulus of 

 the flickering light were not obtrusive. But I observed that whatever I 

 gazed at seem to show a tendency to wave or pulsate. If I looked at the 

 matting on the floor it showed a singular richness of texture, thick and 

 felted, with a tendency to rise in little waves. These effects were 

 apparently due to the play of heightened shadows on the outskirts of 

 the visual field. In the same way a closed door seemed to be ajar, from 

 the heightening of the shadows in the interspaces. 



"I returned to bed still experiencing the same phenomena though 

 in a less degree, and now for the first time there was a tendency for 

 human figures to appear, fantastic and Chinese in character. There 

 were vague hallucinations of smell, sometimes distinct recurrence of the 

 freshly prepared mescal infusion; these olfactory impressions were 

 pleasurable, I think because they involved deep inspirations, and thus 

 relieved the respiratory oppression. 



"At 3 :30 a.m. I felt that the phenomena were diminishing and was 

 able to settle down to sleep. When I awoke two hours later, after a 

 peaceful and dreamless sleep, there was a slight headache and the visions 

 were still present with closed eyes, though they were now in somber 

 colors, brown and black. I slept again for an hour or so and rose at 

 the usual time feeling by no means tired, and with an excellent appetite ; 

 except for a slight headache which passed off in the course of the 

 morning, I felt none the worse but rather the better for my experiment. 

 The only after-effect was a slightly hypersesthetic vision for colored 

 objects (as at the beginning of the experiment), lasting for a day or so, 

 and more especially noticeable as regards blue, so that a familiar notice- 

 board in the Strand with dark-blue background was much more con- 

 spicuous and intensely blue than usual." 



IV. 



The experiment just described may be regarded as fairly typical of 

 the effects of mescal in an ordinarily healthy subject, so far as my 



