516 The American Naturalist. [Jme , 



It would take too long to recapitulate all the evidence collected by 

 Mr. Wm. Romaine Newbold, Lecturer on Psychology in the Univer- 

 sity of Pennsylvania, in verification of Ansel Bourne's statements 

 whilst in trance. At the Kellogg House, where " Brown " stayed for 

 about two weeks before going to Norristown, he was well remembered 

 by the colored waiter Jackson, and by Mrs. Kellogg. They described 

 him as a very quiet man, who said he was a carpenter and came from 

 " down east, somewhere." Every day he used to go out and look out 

 for a suitable place to begin business in. After a while he came one 

 day and said he had found just the place for him, and that was Norris- 

 town. Then he bought goods for the store he intended to open there, 

 all of which goods he left in Jackson's care. " Seemed perfectly him- 

 self," and never gave any reasons for wi.-hii 



here. Afterwards, Jackson and Mrs. Kellogg had seen accounts in 

 the papers and recognized the man there referred to as the man who 

 had stayed with them. They thought, however, he had become crazy 

 after leaving them, but it never occurred to them that there had been 

 anything wrong with him whilst with them. 



I will now give an account, as briefly as I can, of the curious exper- 

 iences which befel Ansel Bourne when he was about thirty years of 

 age ; experiences which were accounted for by the medical man who 

 attended him (Dr. Thurston, of Westerly, R. I.) as the results of sun- 

 stroke, and by the people in the village where he lived as " Wonderful 

 Works of God." 



Ansel Bourne, as already stated, was of ]S T ew England parentage, 

 and, up to the age of thirty-one, was a hard working carpenter who, 

 from being a member of the Baptist church, became a "convinced 

 atheist," not of the aggressive sort, but " silent and stubborn." It 

 must be noted that this "atheism " in a man of scantv education must 

 have been of the shallowest sort, and that beneath the surface lay 

 depths of Calvinistic ancestry and training. He had conceived a rooted 

 aversion for a sect calling itself the " Christian" church, and for one 

 of its ministers who was his near neighbor. 



In August, 1857, he had several attacks of sickness, brought on pos- 

 sibly by working in extremely hot weather, and these attacks culmi- 

 nated in a fit of unconsciousness which lasted from Sunday, the 16th of 

 August, till the following Tuesday, when he became conscious of his 

 condition, but remained in a critical state for some days. The next 

 two mouths were passed in renewed attempts to work, and fresh at- 

 tacks of illness, though of a less serious character than those of August. 

 On Sunday, the 25th of October, he spent the day and evening at his 



