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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



tary movements, in fact, is the very point which 

 distinguishes the frog that has lost its cerebrum 

 from the uninjured frog (Goltz). The question, 

 therefore, must be put thus : " How comes it that 

 the uninjured frog behaves in our experiments after 

 the manner of a frog that has been deprived of 

 its cerebrum ? " Czermak answers : " Because a 

 peculiar condition is in some unknown way pro- 

 duced by the manipulations used in the experi- 

 ments—a sort of catalepsy with symptoms of stu- 

 por — a sort of sleep." I reply: Because in vir- 

 tue of the terror felt by the animal on being seized 

 and held down, its will and intelligence cease to 

 act. It loses the power of movement; that is to 

 say, it becomes deprived of will, because the all- 

 unwonted posture — a posture in which it had 

 never been before — and the sense of being over- 

 powered, suddenly check the deliberative faculty 

 (Ueberlegen). In not a single instance have I 

 seen an animal asleep under the experiments. 

 And as regards the question whether an animal 

 is asleep or not, I had the very best means of 

 forming a correct judgment, having already made 

 considerable investigation into the effects of " fa- 

 tigue-material " on animals. The cause of the 

 state declared to be hypnotic is fright. 



Dr. Heubel, on the other hand, holds the 

 " hypnotic " condition to be perfectly normal 

 and physiological — to be, in short, nothing but 

 ordinary, more or less deep sleep. He supposes 

 that sleep supervenes because the brain is with- 

 out its customary stimuli, which are indispensa- 

 ble for keeping it in the waking state. 



As the reader observes, these three hypoth- 

 eses are sharply contradictory of one another. 

 One might suppose that an animal dominated by 

 fright or mortal terror must be readily distin- 

 guishable from an animal that is sleeping peace- 

 fully. In fact, however, the distinction is not 

 easily drawn. In some cases the animals do 

 actually shut their eyes, though only for a mo- 

 ment, as though they were unable to perform the 

 slight muscular effort needed to keep the lids 

 open. The tremor of the extremities, which is 

 one of the unmistakable symptoms of great ter- 

 ror, docs not appear in every instance. But 

 whoever repeats sufficiently often the experi- 

 ments with warm-blooded animals, especially with 

 Guinea-pigs and hens, will recognize the great 

 improbability of such animals falling asleep in 

 a few seconds under unwonted conditions. No 

 one will deny that warm-blooded animals are 

 filled with terror on being seized and held firmly. 

 Czermak and Heubel speak of this point inci- 

 dentally. Indeed, the former refers the briefer 



duration and the less profundity of the supposed 

 sleep in birds — and he does not seem to have 

 employed mammals — to their state of terror and 

 excitement. He thus actually believes that an 

 animal frightened almost to death may forthwith 

 fall asleep ! The facts are in conflict with this 

 opinion, for all of the birds and Guinea-pigs be- 

 haved very differently from animals asleep. We 

 need but compare the breathing, the action of 

 the heart, and the movements of the intestines, 

 in the two cases. As for the warm-blooded ani- 

 mals, it is certain that they do not sleep, but that 

 they find themselves in a peculiar state, which, 

 if not conditioned or produced by fright, at least 

 regularly accompanies fright — a condition in 

 which the will and motor faculty are in abeyance. 



With a view to avoid using a cumbersome 

 terminology, and at the same time to distinguish 

 by name this from every other state of the or- 

 ganism, I call it cataplexy, from the Greek »caTo- 

 irA?j|os, which means " utterly scared." Animals 

 are subject to cataplexy. 



But what of cold-blooded animals, as frogs ? 

 In their case the duration for hours of this state 

 is quite compatible with the idea that they are in 

 ordinary sleep. Indeed, it must appear to many 

 persons a priori improbable that a frog should 

 possess the capacity for being frightened in so> 

 high a degree as not to recover from its terror 

 even in five hours. Still, I can show, from nu- 

 merous experiments made on frogs, that even in 

 these animals it is not ordinary sleep produced in 

 an unusual way. 



In these experiments my aim was to prevent 

 all direct influence of the experimenting person, 

 or at least all immediate contact with the animal, 

 not so much with a view to refute the pretensions 

 of the partisans of animal magnetism or mes- 

 merism, as to circumscribe locally the excitation 

 of the cutaneous nerves, and to reduce to a mini- 

 mum the complex impressions necessarily pro- 

 duced by seizing the animal with the hand. 

 Hence a frog sitting quite free and at its ease, 

 was noiselessly and quickly seized very firmly 

 with a pair of tongs, and forthwith laid down on 

 the table, together with the tongs, in precisely 

 the same position which it had held before. The 

 regular effect of this surprise, when the operation 

 is performed skillfully, is, that the animal remains 

 perfectly quiet, and without resistance, in un- 

 wonted and oftentimes highly-artificial and un- 

 comfortable positions, until some pretty strong 

 irritation, as from a sound or a shaking, brings it 

 to itself; it then jumps away as though nothing 

 had happened. But, till that moment, all the 



