MESCAL: A NEW ARTIFICIAL PARADISE. 541 



The whole room, with its white-washed but not very white ceiling, 

 thus became vivid and beautiful. The difference between the room as 

 I saw it then and the appearance it usually presents to me was the 

 difference one may often observe between the picture of a room and 

 the actual room. The shadows I saw were the shadows which the 

 artist puts in, but which are not visible in the actual scene under 

 normal conditions of casual inspection. I was reminded of the paint- 

 ings of Claude Monet, and as I gazed at the scene it occurred to me 

 that mescal ])erhaps produces exactly the same conditions of visual 

 hyperciesthesia, or rather exhaustion, as may be produced on tlie artist 

 by the influence of prolonged visual attention. I wished to ascertain 

 how the subdued and steady electric light would influence vision, and 

 passed into the next room; but here the shadows were little marked, 

 although walls and floor seemed tremulous and insubstantial, and the 

 texture of everything was heightened and enriched. 



About 3.30 a. m. I felt that the phenomena were distinctly diminish- 

 ing — though the visions, now chiefly of human figures, fantastic and 

 Chinese in character, still continued — and I was able to settle myself 

 to sleep, which proved peaceful and dreamless. I awoke at the usual 

 hour and exj)erienced no sense of fatigue nor other unpleasant remi- 

 niscence of the experience I had undergone. Only my eyes seemed 

 unusually sensitive to color, especially to blue and violet; I can, indeed, 

 say that ever since this experience I have been more oesthetically sen- 

 sitive than I was before to the more delicate phenomena of light and 

 shade and color. 



It occurred to me that it would be interesting to have the experi- 

 ences of an artist under the influence of mescal, and I induced an 

 artist friend to make a similar experiment. Unfortunately no effects 

 whatever were produced at the first attempt, owing, as I have since 

 discovered, to the fact that the buttons had only been simply infused 

 and their virtues not extracted. To make sure of success the experi- 

 ment was repeated with four buttons, which proved to be an excessive 

 and unpleasant dose. There were paroxysmal attacks of pain at the 

 heart and a sense of imminent death, which naturally alarmed the sub- 

 ject, while so great was the dread of light and dilatation of the pupils 

 that the eyelids had to be kept more or less closed, though it was 

 evident that a certain amount of vision was still possible. The symp- 

 toms came on very suddenly, and when I arrived they were already 

 at their height. As the experiences of this subject were in many 

 respects very unlike mine, I will give them in his own words: "I 

 noticed first that as I happened to turn my eyes away from a blue 

 enamel kettle at which I had been unconsciously looking, and which 

 was standing in the fender of the fireplace, with no fire in it, it seemed 

 to me that I saw a spot of the same blue in the black coals of the 

 grate, and that this spot appeared again, farther off, a little brighter 

 in hue. But I was in doubt whether I had not imagined these blue 

 spots. When, however, I lifted my eyes to the mantelpiece, on which 



