These two contrary conditions, evil and good, were by his physicians called his first and second states, and from them several intermediate and varying states could be produced. His 'fifth state' was especially curious. By being placed in an electric bath, or having a magnet applied to his head, he could for a time be wholly cured of paralysis. He became light and active as a healthy child, and on questioning him it was found that he had indeed gone back to childhood. He was again at the reformatory, and all his life after his fright from the viper was an utter blank. But let him be in any way reminded of that circumstance, and he fell at once into an epileptiform condition, which left him in his ' first' or 'second' state.

Louis V------ is now no longer at Rochefort, and, according to the last account of him, his health and psychical status are both much improved.

The physicians who have had charge of this extraordinary case agree in supposing that the various observed changes point to a dual action of the brain, and the unstable preponderance of one hemisphere. The imperfect speech and violent, insolent conduct associated with the right hemiplegia, in contrast with the clear speech and self-controlled demeanour which accompanied the left hemiplegia, show the contrasting tendencies (in this case) of the supremacy of the right and left hemispheres respectively.

Such marked effects of brain duality seldom appear spontaneously, except among the insane, idiots, and sufferers from brain disease or delirium. Dr. Ireland gives a case of double personality, which he has witnessed in an idiot boy named Finlay. This lad would talk to himself, and argue as if two persons were discussing a question. Sometimes he would thrash himself, saying, ' Finlay is a bad boy to-day,' and then would cry out with pain in his own personality. In some cases, where insanity follows upon injury or disease of one half of the brain, the patient is conscious of the struggle for mastery which is being carried on within him. The organism which remains sound controls the insane impulses of that portion which is damaged, until at last it becomes tired out, and partakes of the common intellectual ruin.

A most remarkable case of double personality is that of Felida X------, which is fully described by the late Dr. Azam," * Professor in the University of Bordeaux. Felida was born in 1843, of respectable parents. From childhood she showed a melancholy and reserved disposition. She was subject to haemoptysis, and dwelt continually on her bad health. At the age of fourteen and a half her first transformation occurred. After a sudden pain in her head, she fell into a short trance, from which she awoke completely metamorphosed. She was now bright and lively, very loquacious, and even noisy. Her health seemed improved, and she did not complain of any ailment. But after a few hours she again fell into a trance, and awoke to find herself in her first or normal state. Henceforth she passed her life alternately in one or the other of those two conditions. For some time the 'second state' did not occupy more than a tenth part of her existence, but by 1875 the relative duration of the two states, which had been changing by degrees, had become reversed, so that she was nearly always in the second state. In this latter condition her memory of the past is complete, but in her first state all that has occurred in her second is utterly forgotten.

Hence have ensued some curious complications; for instance, while in her second stage she showed a very decided preference for a young man, whom in her first she completely ignored. On one occasion she was attending the funeral of a friend, and while returning home in the carriage she had an access of trance, which lasted only a few minutes, and aroused no remark. She awoke in her first state, without any recollection of why she was in the carriage, or whose funeral she had been following. By questioning, however, she managed to set herself right without betraying her change of personality. In due time Felida married and became the mother of several children, but the alternation of personality went on as before, and assuredly she could have no secrets from her husband, as in her second state she revealed everything she had done in her first, even though she had intended to keep it secret.

* ' Hypnotisme, Double Conscience,'etc., Paris, 1887. One of the most interesting histories ever written, Professor Azam being a master of style as well as a scientific observer of the first rank.

Both Louis V------ and Felida X------ proved excellent subjects for hypnotism, and in the case of the former hypnotism produced the same alternation of personality as did metallo-therapy. In this case it seems fair to attribute to its use by Drs. Bourru and Burot some of the credit of his recovery and reformation.

In the cases of Louis V------and Felida X------hypnotism seemed to produce still another phase of personality, but Dr. Richard Hodgson describes a very interesting case of double personality in which hypnotism evoked the ' second state.' The subject was an itinerant preacher, named Ansel Bourne, sixty-one years of age, who one morning disappeared mysteriously from his home, and in spite of the efforts of his friends remained undiscovered for two months. He woke up one morning at Norristown, Pennsylvania, to find that he was keeping a small general shop under the name of A. J. Brown. He had been engaged in this occupation for six weeks, and had appeared to his neighbours as a perfectly normal individual. As a matter of fact, he had been in a state of somnambulism all the time, and he knew nothing on awaking of what had befallen him since he had fallen into a trance whilst walking in the streets of the town where he had been living. Professor James and Dr. Hodgson hypnotized him, and in the hypnotic state he resumed the personality of A. J. Brown, and told his audience what he had been doing during his residence at Norristown and how he got there.*