396 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
never forget the intensity of the lackadaisical tone in which 
she replied to the matrimonial counsels of the physician to 
whom he (she) had been led to give a long detail of his (her) 
hypochondriacal symptoms : 6 A wife for a dying man, doctor ! ’ 
No intentional simulation could have approached the exactness 
of the imitation, alike in tone, manners, and language, which 
spontaneously proceeded from the idea with which the fair 
6 subject ’ was possessed, that she herself experienced all the dis- 
comforts whose detail she had doubtless frequently heard from 
the real sufferer.” * 
While this state lasted the lady’s own personality vanished, 
and she was, so far as her own knowledge and consciousness 
were concerned, the hypochondriacal clergyman whose ways 
she imitated. In a case of intoxication the loss of the real 
personality was only partial — a man knew perfectly well who 
he was, but referred all his own drunken symptoms to his 
family, and insisted upon undressing them and putting them to 
bed, affirming that they had taken too much to do those things 
for themselves ! 
The alternating form of dual personality may possibly ex- 
plain some of the stories of “spiritual manifestations.” A 
believer in these performances cannot be induced to accept as a 
solution of the apparent wonders the explanation that the 
medium is cheating him. The said medium, male or female, 
as the case may be, is well known, he says, to be a most 
veracious person, quite incapable of deceit— a most simple- 
minded person, unable to concoct a fraud. This may be so in 
the normal condition, but what has the so-called mediumistic 
state done ? It usually comes on, more or less, like the somno- 
lence of the girl Felida, and perhaps it transforms a reliable 
person into either an unwilling dupe of morbid sensations, or a 
cunning cheat. 
Cerebral physiology is not yet advanced enough to say how the 
brain acts, or whether functions are rigidly localised. Professor 
Grolz has recently shown that functions which seem quite des- 
troyed by excision of large portions of one hemisphere, reappear 
after a time, if the animal subjected to the process can be kept 
alive. A physiologist who contributes to the “ Academy,” re- 
ferring to these experiments as narrated in “ Pfliiger’s Archives,” 
says : “ A belief in the existence of localized centres in the 
cortical substance is incompatible with the fact that lesion of 
any part whatever of a hemisphere is followed by one and the 
same train of symptoms, and with the observed restoration of 
the particular functions over which those centres are supposed 
to preside.” May one who has no pretensions to be a physio- 
logist suggest that the grey matter of the brain may have its 
* u Mental Physiology,” p. 523. 
