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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Prof. Lazarus had been wearying his eyes trying to make out a 

 certain rock on a distant mountain side ; as he turned away he 

 saw vividly the corpse of a friend stretched out before him. 

 Upon reflection he found that this friend had been associated 

 with the train of ideas that had filled his mind just before he 

 began to look for the rock. He also found that whenever he 

 closed his eyes he saw a dull, grayish-green, corpselike color, 

 which was the complementary after image of the dull reds, 

 browns, and greens of the mountain side. He also found that 

 other persons of whom he thought appeared to him of the same 

 corpselike tint. In this case the main character of the hallucina- 

 tion that is, the thought of a friend was furnished by associa- 

 tion of ideas, but its special form, the appearance of that friend 

 as a corpse, as well as its sensory vividness, seems to have been 

 due to the peripheral factor. 



A closely analogous experience is reported by a Mrs. L 



in 



the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, volume x, 

 page 143 : " About September, 1881, aged forty-six, and eighteen 

 months after the sudden death of my mother, which had shaken my 

 nerves very much, one night toward morning, being awake to the 

 best of my belief, I saw a woman come through the door. Her face 

 was sideways and I distinctly saw her features. She passed 

 slowly from the door and went out at the window opposite, thus 

 passing across the foot of my bed. She had on an old-fashioned 

 bonnet and an old-fashioned caped coat, and she was carrying a 

 basket in front of her such as country women carry their hus- 

 bands' dinners in. The whole figure was semi-opaque, neutral- 

 tinted, like thick smoke or cloud. A great hurricane was blow- 

 ing. I was dreadfully disturbed and hysterical next day the 

 impression so vivid and yet unable to say who it was. About a 

 week after, the revelation came. I sat down to dinner, became 

 very hysterical and faint, and went into another room alone in 

 the dark. All at once I jumped up, saying, 'It is Mrs. Beasant ! ' 

 Mrs. Beasant was the pretty young bride of a farmer with whom, 

 when about ten years old, we used to go and take tea at a farm 

 about two or three miles from the vicarage. One day she went 

 with her husband's dinner as usual, and he was felling a tree. She 

 passed the wrong way, and the tree fell on her and killed her. I 

 remember watching her funeral with my nurse, and the anguish 

 of spirit at her death, but never remember speaking of it or the 

 circumstance since. The day before the appearance a nurse of 

 the name of Beasant had disturbed and annoyed me. A few 

 months before a large elm tree had fallen in our garden and partly 

 on the house. A hurricane was blowing at the time, and I remem- 

 ber thinking, ' What a lucky thing that tree can't fall on the roof ! " 

 Clearly the storm, the falling tree, and the annoying nurse were 



