ILLUSIONS AND HALLUCINATIONS. 639 



a rocky coast, a rough sea, an expanse of sand in the foreground. 

 As I watched, the picture was nearly effaced by that of a mouse, 

 so large that I could see only a bit of cliff above his tail. Two 

 days later I was reading a volume of poetry which I remembered 

 having cut open, talking the while, certainly not consciously 

 reading, on the day of my vision. As I turned over the leaves, a 

 couiDle of lines struck me as somehow familiar, though the book, 

 a volume by Aldrich, was quite new to me : 



Only the sea intoning, 

 Only the wainscot mouse. 



These, I imagine, suggested the images.'^ Doubtless Miss X 's 



eye had fallen on these lines ; possibly they aroused some fleeting 

 images in the upper consciousness which were then forgotten. 

 But granting the existence of the subconscious, it is more easy 

 to understand the case upon the supposition that the whole 

 process took place outside the range of her normal conscious- 

 ness. 



A still more striking case of the same author's has been much 

 quoted : 



" On March 20th I happened to want the date of Ptolemy 

 Philadelphus, which I could not recall, though feeling sure I 

 knew it, and that I associated it with an event of some impor- 

 tance. When looking in the crystal some hours later, I found a 

 picture of an old man with long, white hair and beard, dressed 

 like a Lyceum Shylock, and busy writing in a large book with 

 tarnished, massive clasps. I wondered much who he was and 

 what he could possibly be doing, and thought it a good oppor- 

 tunity of carrying out a suggestion which had been made to me 

 of examining objects in the crystal with a magnifying glass. The 

 glass revealed to me that my old gentleman was writing in Greek, 

 though the lines faded away as I looked, all but the characters he 

 had last traced — the Latin numerals LXX. Then it flashed into 

 my mind that he was one of the Jewish elders at work on the 

 Septuagint, and that its date, 277 b. c, would serve equally well 

 for Ptolemy Philadelphus. It may be worth while to add, though 

 the fact was not in my conscious memory at the moment, that I 

 had once learned a chronology on a mnemonic system which sub- 

 stituted letters for figures, and that the memoria teclinica for this 

 date was, ' Now Jewish elders indite a Greek copy.' " 



If this strange vision had ever been suggested to Miss X 



before by her mnemonic line, why did she not recognize it ? 

 And if it had not been suggested before, either it had been 

 suggested in her subconsciousness or else it was suggested to 

 her upper consciousness by a subconscious memory of the mne- 

 monic line. 



