92 “ Jumpers ” of Maine. [February, 
disease of nervous debility. Those who suffer most from it 
are the very opposite of neurasthenics or ansemics; they 
have none of the symptoms detailed in my work on nervous 
exhaustion ; they are full-blooded and strong-nerved, capable 
of working hard and long at the most toilsome service, and 
will hold themselves up full and sturdy and enduring, side 
by side with the hardiest men in the nation. Like “ servant- 
girl hysteria,” and like certain forms of chorea or “jerks” as 
they are called, which appear or have appeared in certain 
religious revivals, like the “ Holy Rollers”* as they were 
called in the religious revivals of northern New Hampshire, 
these Jumpers are contributions to psychology more than to 
pathology. Far out of the range of the aided senses, far 
beyond the reach of the microscope, or perhaps of the spec- 
troscope, there may be molecular changes or disturbances 
which manifest themselves in these jumpings and strikings 
and throwings as a result and correlative. But for the present, 
possibly for all time, we can only study this subject psycho- 
logically ; we can only approach it satisfactorily from the 
psychological side. Only those who clearly recognise the two 
distinct types of hysteria, the neurasthenic or anaemic form, 
which may be called physical hysteria, and the mental or 
psychical form, which may be called psychical hysteria, can 
understand the nature of this peculiar malady of the 
Jumpers; but those who do comprehend and recognise these 
two types of hysteria will have little difficulty in compre- 
hending the general nature of this jumping and its position 
among the neuroses. Some of the cases of hysteria major 
on which Charcot has experimented with his metals and 
magnets belong, as I am persuaded from personal observa- 
tion, to psychical or mental rather than to physical diseases. 
I can find in the families of those who suffer from jumping no 
proof of any form of functional or organic nervous disease. 
Jumping is, therefore, a trancoidal condition, exhibiting a 
part of the phenomena of trance, and bearing the same re- 
lation to trance that certain epileptoidal conditions bear to 
epilepsy. 
Although the phenomena exhibited by the Jumpers are 
analogous to those of mesmeric trance, of mental hysteria, of 
the “Jerkers” and “Holy Rollers” in revivals, they yet 
differ from all these and all allied forms of nervous disorder 
in these two respeCts : 
i. The momentary character of the manifestations. 
In but a second or so all the aCts of the Jumper — striking, 
throwing, dropping, crying, jerking, or jumping — are over 
* So called because they rolled over and over on the floor while under re- 
ligious excitement. 
