820 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



this state and bring him gently to a consciousness of his true 

 situation, but he soon fell into a convulsive attack and passed 

 out of it. 



I have no comments to make upon the reported efficacy of 

 magnets and other physical agents in producing these phenomena. 

 Most neurologists maintain, I believe, that they act only through 

 suggestion, but a few claim that they have in some cases a specific 

 effect. I have never seen any such phenomena myself, but the evi- 

 dence is strong and the field seems to me one of the most promis- 

 ing for psycho-physiological investigation. 



Quite apart from that, there can be no doubt that this constant 

 shifting and redistribution of the elements of Louis V 's per- 

 sonality rest at bottom upon a physiological foundation. Espe- 

 cially significant is the impairment of speech, when the paralysis 

 was transferred from the left to the right side. The right side of 

 the body is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, and 

 vice versa. Now, it is known that in right-handed people the 

 organ of speech is situated upon the left side of the brain. If 

 these phenomena were wholly dependent upon suggestion, the 

 patient's mental symptoms would correspond to what he thought 

 they ought to be. But he would scarcely know that a right-sided 

 paralysis ought to be accompanied by disorders of speech. It 

 seems to me quite certain that in one of these states the right 

 hemisphere was chiefly active and in the other the left ; it is fair 

 to infer that his other states depended also upon the functioning 

 of definite portions of his brain, although one can not specify what 

 those portions were. 



Mr. F. W. H. Myers, in commenting upon this case,* con- 

 jectures that possibly in all of us the right hemisphere is less 

 highly evolved than the left, and that, "just as certain of our 

 visceral arrangements retain the traces of our prehuman ances- 

 try, and just as our dextro-cerebral speech centers are often stam- 

 mering, childish, or wholly inefficient, so also our dextro-cerebral 

 ' character- forming ' centers — the centers which on that side of 

 the brain sum up or represent our highest activities — may retain, 

 in their inferior evolution, traces of that savage ancestry which 

 forms the somber background of the refinements and felicities of 

 civilized men." 



Louis V 's states, although more complex than those of 



Fdlida X and Ansel Bourne, do not differ from them in kind. 



In all we have an apparent dissolution of the conscious self and 

 the reconstruction of its elements into a new form. But one of 

 these forms calls for special comment. In his last state Louis 

 seemed to have fallen back into the condition in which he was 



* Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. iv, p. 23, 



