CANNABIS INDICA


Cannabis Indica homeopathy medicine – drug proving symptoms from Encyclopedia of Pure Materia Medica by TF Allen, published in 1874. It has contributions from R Hughes, C Hering, C Dunham, and A Lippe….


  Common names: Hashish, or Bhang, or Ganja, or Birmingi. (The best variety is that grown in India at an elevation of 6 to 10, 000 feet).

Introduction

The East Indian Cannabis sativa, Linn. Natural order: Cannabineae. Preparation: Tincture of the young leaves and twigs.

Mind

Emotional. Excitement. Very excited; he began dancing about the room; frequently laughing; talked nonsense; knew that he was talking nonsense, but could not stop without an effort of the will, which he did not care to make. Easily excited and irritated, in the afternoon. He shouts, leaps into the air, and claps his hands for joy. He sings, and extemporizes both words and music. On becoming conscious, he finds himself dancing, laughing, and singing before a looking-glass. Incoherent talking. Tendency to blaspheme. Every now and then speaks uncontrollably loud, and then corrects himself (after three hours). While visiting patients, have great difficulty to refrain from saying or doing unusual things. Had a distinct sensation that he must keep himself sober till he got to bed, otherwise he might do something foolish. Accents the last syllable in all his words, and laughs immoderately. Quickness of ideas and pleasant sensations. Constant succession of new ideas, each one of which was almost instantly forgotten. Rapid succession of unassociated ideas, and impossibility to follow a train of thought (after one hour). The flow of ideas was very rapid; though early, it seemed to him that it was very late in the day; the fantasies continued through the night and prevented sleep. His mind is filled with ridiculous speculative ideas. Fixed ideas. Thoughts followed one another through my head in most rapid succession; they were very vivid, but were forgotten immediately, at their very beginning. Constantly theorizing. Falls constantly into reveries. Delightful reveries came over him. He seemed to have the one idea that he should die and soon be dissected. He seemed possessed with the idea that he did not know whether he himself existed, or whether men generally existed, or for what purpose he existed. He became possessed with the idea that he was about to die, from which he cried out, “I am dying; I shall be carried to my death-chamber,”. The idea that he must die returned several times, and seemed to be particularly connected with the sinking and disappearance of the pulse. Called the nurse, “for he was about to die” (after one hour). When in bed, he knew where he was, and yet did not; imagined he was at home, and could hear all the usual sounds; by a strong effort he could recollect the truth, then again relapsed (after one hour). Looks under beds and tables, unlocks and re- locks doors, for he fancies he hears strange noises, and that thieves are in the house. When his friends went out of the room, he thought they had left him to his fate, and wrote “cowards” in his notes. Imagines men are bribed to kill him. He thinks he can fly through the air like the birds. Said “he had been transported to heaven,” and his language, usually commonplace, became quite enthusiastic (after one hour). All round and within seems to be a great mystery, and is terrifying. Despair, and fear of being eternally lost. On hearing the name of God, he cried, “Stop! that name is terrible to me; I cannot bear it. I am dying”. Now demoniac shapes clutched at him from the darkness, cloaked from head to foot in inky pails, glaring at him with fiery eyes from beneath their cowls. He seemed to be walking in a vast arena, encircled by tremendous walls. The stars seemed to look upon him with pitying human aspect, and to bewail his condition. The sun seemed reeling from him place, and the clouds danced around him like a chorus. “I could trace the circulation of the blood along each inch of its progress. I knew when every valve opened and shut. The beating of my heart was so clearly audible that I wondered it was not heard by others”. Violent ecstasies of pleasure or agonies of terror and pain are constantly followed by more gentle and quiet forms of delirious excitement or hallucination. He seems possessed of a dual existence, one of which from a height watches the other, while it passes through the various phases of the Hashish delirium. Had a feeling of duality. One of his minds would be thinking of something, while the other would laugh at it. Quick transition of the ideas of one mind to the other. Felt as if he was third person, looking at himself and his friend (after one hour). The soul seemed to be separated from the body, and to look down upon it, and view all the motions of the vital processes, and to be able to pass and repass through the solid walls of the room, and to view the landscape beyond. Extreme apparent protraction of time (second day). Extreme exaggerations of the duration of time and extent of space a few seconds seem ages, the utterance of a word seems as long as a whole drama, and a few rods are a distance which can never be passed, it is so great. The room expands, and those around the center-table near recede to vast distances, and the ceiling is raised, and he is in a vast hall. When his friends had gone, he went into the bedroom; stood in a reverie, which seemed to last three to four hours, looking through the half-opened door into the sitting-room. The sitting-room seemed to be of an immense depth below him (it was really on the same floor). Attention principally occupied by an hallucination that time was indefinitely prolonged. Seemed to himself to have sat there for hours, and when he tried to think why he did so, nearly lost control over his reason, and a rapid whirl of confused and irrelevant thoughts prevented his fixing attention on any one point for a moment, and it was only the effort of checking himself when falling which recalled him to himself, and then he suddenly recollected “Cannabis Indica” but when did he take it? Surely it was yesterday, last week, days ago. On summoning his servant, it seemed a few weeks before he came. His calculation of the time he enjoyed the dreams was about three hundred years, the fact being that only a quarter of an hour had elapsed. When writing these notes, time seemed prolonged; he seemed to dream between each stroke of the pencil. His friends seemed gone out of the room a long time. Among the first effects was noticed that the letter or number which had just been written seemed like something that had long since been accomplished. Minutes seem to be days. The length of time occupied in urinating seemed days instead of seconds (after four hours). Only ten minutes had elapsed, and he thought at least hours had gone by. Only ten minutes had now elapsed, but it seemed to him to be two hours. His sensations were exalted and magnified; his pulse felt to him to be stronger; ideas flowed more rapidly; the pictures on the wall seemed larger that reality. He could count his pulse well; it did not seem to him to be beating slowly, though time seemed prolonged. A friend who was in the same room seemed a long way off (after one hour). Strange feeling of isolation from all around him, with great sense of loneliness, though surrounded by his friends. He imagines that he is possessed of infinite knowledge and power of vision, and then that he is Christ come to restore the world to perfect peace. He believes there is creative power, in his own word, and that he has only to speak, and it will be done. He believes he is Daniel Webster, and omnipotent in argumentative eloquence. Then he possesses the wealth of the world, and with a benevolence equal to his wealth, showers riches on all the needy around him. It seemed as though I was transparent; the fire in the grate seemed to shine through me, and to warm the marrow of the bones. I felt the blood course in my veins, and everything within me trembled with the most extreme pleasure. His body seemed to him to become transparent, he imagined he was within his breast the hashish he had eaten in the form of an emerald, from which issued millions of little sparks. Imagines he is gradually swelling, his body becoming larger and larger. Hallucinations which lead the patient to imagine that he is on horseback, is hunting, that he sees blue water, that he is swimming, or that he is captain of a vessel, that he is travelling, that he has no weight. Illusion that he was a pump- log, through which a stream of hot water was playing, and threatening his friend with a wetting. Illusion that he was an inkstand, and that, as he lay on the bed, the ink might spill over the white counterpane. In the person of an ink-stand he opened and shut his brass cover, it had a hinge, shook himself, and both saw and felt the ink splash against his glass sides, and angry at his friends’ incredulity, turned with his face towards the wall, and would not speak a word. He seems to be the subject of the strangest transformations; now he is a huge saw, and darts up and down, while planks fly off on either side of him in utter completeness; and then he is a bottle of soda-water, running to and fro; then a huge hippopotamus; then giraffe. He seems to himself to be transformed into a vegetable existence, as a huge fern, and to be surrounded by clouds of music and perfume. He laughs immoderately and involuntarily at the impression that his leg was a tin case filled with stair-rods, which he hears rattle as he walks. Then suddenly the other leg seems to extend its length till he is raised some hundreds of feet into the air, and on this he is compelled to hop as he is waling with his friend. His eyelashes became indefinitely prolonged, and began to roll as gold threads upon small ivory wheels, which revolved with great velocity. His voice seems strange, as if not his own. All impressions on the senses are exceedingly exaggerated. It seemed to him as though he was upon the ridge of a mountain, that he must climb a steep ascent over the naked rock to the top of the mountain. He imagines, while walking with his friend by a small stream, that it is the Nile, and he the traveller Bruce. He though he was in Mr. C’.s room, and recognized the pictures as belonging to him, though they were really Mr. R’.s, in whose room he was. The walls of the room area suddenly covered with dancing satyres, and mandarins nod from all its corners. Fancies, on opening his bedroom door, that he sees numberless diabolical imps, with bloody faces and immense black eyes, which so terrify him that he sinks on his knees, a cold sweat breaks out on his body, his heart beats violently he thinks he will suffocate, and cries loudly for help; suddenly one of the imps commences playing on a hand-organ and making such grotesque grimaces that he bursts into fits of laughter. On the wall of the room, at a great distance, a monstrous head was spiked up, which commenced a succession of grimaces of the most startling but ludicrous character. Its ferociously bearded under-jaw extended indefinitely, and then the jaw shooting back, the mouth opened form ear to ear. The nose spun out into absurd enormity, and the eyes winked with the rapidity of lightning. Thrown into “unbearable horror” by the falling upon him of a “shower of soot from heaven”. All the events of his past life, even those long forgotten, and those the most trivial, were thrown in symbols from a rapidly revolving wheel, each of which was recognized as an act of his life, and each came in the order of sequence the act it indicated occupied in history. He has ludicrous visions of old and wrinkled females, who are found to composed of knit yarn. Illusions of the senses. He hears voices, and the most sublime music. He sees visions of beauty and glory that can only be equalled in Paradise. Landscapes of sublimest beauty, with profusion of flowers of most brilliant colors, in contrast, to afford the greatest delight. Architecture of magnificent beauty and grandeur, and all giving a consciousness of happiness for the time, without mixture. Vision of a silent army passed him in the street, in the evening, when walking. When walking in the open air, the plain is suddenly expanded and covered with a band of Tartars, who rush along in mad haste, their caps streaming with plumes and horsehair. While walking in the street, the houses suddenly become movable and take to nodding, bowing, and dancing in the in the most remarkable manner. His familiar acquaintance is mistaken for a Chinese mandarin. When walking in the street, he suddenly sees the muffled figure of a man start from the wall. His appearance is such as to excite the utmost horror. “Every lineament of his face was stamped with the records of a life black with damning crime. It glared on me with a ferocious wickedness and a stony despair. I seemed to grow blasphemous in looking at him, and in an agony of fear turned to run away. Suddenly awoke, after midnight, and found himself in a realm of the most perfect clarity of view, yet terrible with an infinitude of demoniac shadows. Beside the bed, in the centre of the room, stood a bier, from whose corners drooped the folds of a heavy pall, and on it a fearful corpse, whose livid face was distorted with the pangs of assassination. Every muscle was tense, the finger-nails pierced the dead man’s palm by the force of his dying clench. Two tapers at the head and two at the feet made the ghastliness of the bier more luminously unearthly, and a smothered laugh of derision from some invisible watcher mocked the corpse, as if triumphant demons were exulting over their prey. “Then the walls of the room began slowly to glide together, the ceiling coming down, the floor ascending, like the captive’s cell which was doomed to be his tomb. Nearer and nearer I was borne toward the corpse. I shrunk back; I tried to cry out, but speech was paralyzed. The walls came closer and closer. Presently my hand lay on the dead man’s forehead. I was stifled in the breathless niche, which was all the space still left to me. The stony eyes stared up into mine, and again the maddening peal of fiendish laughter rang close beside my ear. Now I was touched on all sides by the walls of the terrible press; then came a heavy crush, and I felt all sense blotted out in darkness”. “I awakened; the corpse was gone, but I had taken its place on the bier. The room had now grown into a gigantic hall, whose roof was framed of iron arches. Pavement, walls, cornice were all iron, and a thrill from them seemed to say this iron is a tearless fiend. I suffered from the vision of that iron as from the presence of giant assassin. Then there emerged from the sulphurous twilight the most horrible form, a fiend, also of iron, white-hot, and dazzling with the glory of the nether penetralia. A face that was the incarnation of all malice and irony looked on me with a glare, withering from its intense heat, but more from the wickedness it symbolized. Beside him another demon rocked a cradle framed of bars of iron, and candescent with a heat fierce as the fiends. And now a chant of blasphemy, so fearful that no human thought has ever conceived of it, from the demons, till I grew intensely wicked by hearing it. The music accorded with the thought, and with its clangor mixed the maddening creak of the forever oscillating cradle, until I felt driven to a ferocious despair. Suddenly, the nearest fiend thrust a pitchfork of white-hot iron into my side, and hurled me into the fiery cradle. I lay unconsumed, tossing from side to side by rocking of the fiery engine, and still the chant of blasphemy, and the eyes of demoniac sarcasm smiled at me in mockery. `Let us sing to him,’ said one of the fiends, ‘the lullaby of hell!'”. “Withered like a leaf in the breath of an oven, after millions of years, I felt myself tossed on the iron floor. Presently, I was in a colossal square, and surrounded by houses a hundred stories high. With bitter thirst, I ran to a fountain carved in iron, every jet of which was sculptured in mockery of water, and yet as dry as the ashes of a furnace. I called for water, when every sash in all the hundred stories of that square flew up, and a maniac stood at every window. They gnashed at me, glared, gibbered, howled, laughed, horribly hissed, and cursed. Then I became insane at the sight, and leaping up and down, mimicked them all. From zenith to horizon an awful angel of midnight blackness floated. His face looked unutterable terrors into me, and his dreadful hands half-clenched above my head, as if waiting to take me by the hair. Across the firmament a chariot came like lightning, with wheels like rainbow suns. At its approach, the sable angel turned and rushed down into the horizon, that seemed to smoke as he slid through it, and I was saved. The scene then became theatrical, and he an actor, who improvised his tragedy and held his immense audience entranced. Suddenly, a look of suspicion came over every face. “I sought relief by turning from the pit to the boxes. The same stony glance met me still. Oh! they knew my secret, and at that instant one maddening chorus broke from the whole theatre, ‘Hashish! Hashish! He has eaten Hashish!’ I crept from the stage in unutterable shame. I crouched in concealment. I looked at my garments, and beheld them foul and ragged as a beggar’s. From head to foot I was the incarnation of squalidity. My asylum proved on the pavement of a great city’s principal thoroughfare. Children pointed at me; loungers stood and searched me with inquisitive scorn. The multitude of man and beast all eyed me; the very stones in the street mocked me with a human raillery as I cowered against a side wall in my bemired rags”. Imagines some one calls him. He hears music of the sweetest and sublimest melody and harmony, and sees venerable bards with their harps, who play as if it were the music of heaven. In music, a single tone seemed like the most divine harmony. Imagines he hears music; shuts his eyes, and is lost for some time in the most delicious thoughts and dreams. He fancies he hears numberless bells ringing most sweetly. For fully two weeks after, when sitting in his office, in quiet summer afternoons, reading desultorily, he would hear most magnificent harmony, as if some master-hand were playing an organ, and using only the softer stops. There was this peculiarity about the hearing of the music, namely, one must be in a state of half reverie, and then the divine strains, soft and marvellously sweet, followed one another in a smoother legato than any human fingering every accomplished. If one roused the attention and strained the ear, as if to be sure of catching every chord, silence came at once. Heard the noise of colors, green, red, blue, and yellow sounds coming to him in perfectly distinct waves. After such experience of ecstasy as has already been described, when just emerging from a dense wood, he heard a hissing whisper, “Kill thyself! Kill thyself!” “I turned to see who spoke. No one was visible. The whisper was repeated with intense earnestness; and now unseen tongues repeated it on all sides and in the air above me, ‘The Most High commands thee to kill thyself’. I drew forth my knife, opened it, and placed it at my throat, when I felt the blow of some invisible hand strike my arm; my hand flew back at the force of the shock, and the knife went spinning into the bushes. The whispers ceased. In his first experiment, the sensations it produced were those, physically, of exquisite lightness and airiness; mentally, of a wonderfully keen perception of the ludicrous in the most simple and familiar objects. Objects by which he was surrounded assumed such a strange and whimsical expression, became in themselves so inexpressibly absurd and comical, that he was provoked into a long fit of laughter. The hallucination died away as gradually as it came, leaving him overcome with a soft pleasant drowsiness, from which he sank into a deep refreshing sleep. In his second experiment, the same fine nervous thrill (that he experienced in his first experiment) suddenly shot through him. But this time it was accompanied by a burning sensation at the pit of the stomach, and instead of growing upon him with a gradual pace of healthy slumber, and resolving him, as before, into air, it came with the intensity of a pang, and shot throbbing along the nerves to the extremities of his body. It seemed to him as if he existed without form throughout a vast extent of space. His whole body seemed to expand, and the arch of his skull to be broader than the vault of heaven. His sensations presented themselves to him in a double form; one physical, and therefore, to a certain extent, tangible, and the other spiritual, and revealing itself in a succession of splendid metaphors. His physical feeling of being was accompanied by an image of an exploding meteor, not subsiding into darkness, but continuing to shoot from its centre or nucleus, which corresponded to the burning spot at the pit of his stomach, incessant coruscations of light, that finally lost themselves in the infinity of space. His mind was crowded with a succession of visions, but all ending in the ludicrous. While he was most completely under the influence of the drug, he was perfectly conscious that he sat in the tower of Antonio’s hotel, in Damascus, knew that he had taken Hashish, and that the strange, gorgeous, and ludicrous fancies which possessed him were the effects of it. He was conscious of two distinct conditions of being in the same moment, of which neither conflicted with the other. His enjoyment of the visions was complete and absolute, undisturbed by the faintest doubts of their reality; while, in some other chamber of his brain, reason sat coolly watching them, and heaping the liveliest ridicule on their fantastic features. One set of nerves was thrilled with the bliss of the gods, while another was convulsed with unquenchable laughter at that very bliss. His highest ecstasies could not bear down and silence the weight of his ridicule, which, in its turn, was powerless to prevent him from running into other and more gorgeous absurdities. After awhile the visions became more grotesque than ever, but less agreeable; and there was a painful tension throughout his nervous system. He laughed until his eyes overflowed profusely; every drop that fell immediately became a large loaf of bread, and tumbled upon the shopboard of a baker in the bazaar at Damascus. The more he laughed, the faster the loaves fell, until such a pile was raised about the baker that he could hardly see the top of his head. A fierce and furious heat radiated from the stomach throughout his system; his mouth and throat were as hard as though made of brass, and his tongue, it seemed to him, was a bar of rusty iron. Although he seized a pitcher of water and drank long and deeply, his palate and throat gave no intelligence of his having drunk at all. About midnight his excited blood rushed through his frame with a sound like the roaring of mighty waters. It was projected into his eyes until he could no longer see; it beat thickly on his ears, and so throbbed on his heart, that he feared the ribs would give way under its blows. He tore upon his vest, placed his hand over the spot, and tried to count the pulsations; but there were two hearts, one beating at the rate of a thousand beats a minute, and the other with a slow, dull motion. His throat he thought was filled to the brim with blood, and streams of blood were pouring from his ears. After the visions were over, there arose a sensation of distress, which was more severe than pain itself. His throat was as dry as a potsherd, and his stiffened tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. About 3 o’clock the next morning, rather more than five hours after the Hashish had been taken he sunk into a stupor. All the following day and night he lay in a state of blank oblivion, broken only by a single wavering gleam of consciousness. He arose, attempted to dress himself, drank two cups of coffee, and then fell back into the same deathlike stupor. On the morning of the second day, after a sleep of thirty hours, he awoke again to the world, with a system utterly prostrate and unstrung, and a brain clouded with the lingering images of his visions. There was no taste in what he ate, no refreshment in what he drank, and it required a painful effort to comprehend what was said to him, and return a coherent answer. After drinking a glass of very acid sherbet, he experienced instant relief of these symptoms. The spell was not wholly broken, and for two or three days he continued subject to frequent involuntary fits of absence of mind. The ruling hallucination of one of his companions was that he was a locomotive. In about an hour and a half after taking I perceived a heaviness of the head, wandering of the mind, and apprehension that I was going to faint. I thence passed into a state of half-trance, from which I awoke suddenly and much refreshed. The impression was that of wandering out of myself; I had two beings, and there were two distinct, yet concurrent trains of ideas. Images came floating before me; not the figures of a dream, but those that seem to play before the eye when it is closed; and with those figures were strangely mixed the sounds of a guitar that was being played in an adjoining room; the sounds seemed to cluster in and pass away with the figures in the retina. The music of the wretched performance was heavenly, and seemed to proceed from a full orchestra, and to be reverberated through long halls of mountains. These figures and sounds were again connected with metaphysical reflections, which also, like the sounds, clustered themselves into trains of thought, which seemed to take form before my eyes, and weave themselves with the colors and sounds. I was following a train of reasoning; new points would occur, and concurrently there was a figure before me throwing out corresponding shoots, like a zinc tree; and then, as the moving figures reappeared, or as the sounds caught my ear, the other classes of figures came out distinctly, and danced through each other. The reasonings were long and elaborate, and though the impression of having gone through them remains, every effort has been in vain to recall them. The following scene was described by me, and taken down at the time: A general commanding an army, and doubting whether he should engage the enemy, consulted the oracle. The oracle answered: “Go with the fortune of Caesar”. He gave battle, and was beaten. His king ordered his head to he cut off; but the general accused the oracle. The king cried, “The oracle is not in fault; it did not tell you that you were Caesar. You were twice a fool to mistake its meaning, and your own worth”. The general answered, “Then is the fault his who sent a fool to command his armies”. “Nay,” answered the king, “thou shalt not twist one phrase to thy benefit, and another to my loss”. This scene seemed to pass before me, and in the region of Carthage, which was all familiar, though I had never been there. The general was an Abyssinian; the king a white man with black beard. The next time I tried it the only effect was to make me lose a night’s rest (taken toward evening). The first time (taken in the morning) it had given me a double portion of sleep; on both occasions it enormously increased my appetite. It was followed by no depression. The first time I took it at half past four, and after that a liqueur-glass of caraway spirits, to hasten the effect. I did not feel cold, while those who were walking with me, and wrapped in mantles, were complaining of it. Then came an unsteadiness of gait; not that of one who fears to fall, but of one who tries to keep down, for I felt as if there were springs in my knees, and was reminded of the story of the man with the mechanical leg, that walked away with him. I sat down to dinner at half past 6 o’clock. There was a glass between me and the rest of the company, and an inch or two interposed between me and whatever I touched. What I ate and how much did not matter; the food flowed like river through me. There was a wind going by, blowing over the table and carrying away the sounds, and I saw the words tumbling over one another over the falls. There was a dryness of the mouth, which was not thirst. The dryness radiated from the back of the throat, opposite the nape of the neck. It was a patch of dark-blue color; the food, as it reached this point, pouring down, and taking the color of the patch. I was under the impression that I described all this at the time, but was told that I would not say anything about myself, or describe what I experienced. I should have been relieved if some one present had been under the same influence. The bursts of laughter to which I gave rise were not at all pleasing, except when they were excited by any observation I made which was not connected with myself. I never lost the consciousness of what was going on; there were always present the real objects, as well as the imaginary ones; but at times I began to doubt which was which, and then I floated in strange uncertainty. It came by fits, with, I thought, hours of intervals, when only minutes could have elapsed. Their first sensations were of intense astonishment at the circumstance that they found themselves no longer masters of their own acts, while they still remained lucid witnesses of all acts, however foolish. Here the difference between alcoholic inebriation and that from Hashish is strongly marked. They was themselves committing absurdities of the most grotesque kind; leaping, beating time to nothing, moving their arms as if receiving electrical shocks, writing ridiculous words, and so forth, without any power on their part to prevent such exhibitions; but yet standing, as it were, independently of them, as though they were merely subjects of observation exhibited from other persons than themselves. At first they had the sensation and appearance of feigning a state of exaltation which they did not feel, and which was even feigned with so much uncertainty and awkwardness that any one not aiding in it would for a long time believe in its unreality. It is, nevertheless, an irresistible propensity. At one moment the intellect is obscure, and loses itself in forgetfulness of the past; then it returns clear, and is able to form a judgment for a moment, and disapprove of any acts it may have before sanctioned, but only to be again involved in that state of automatic folly which is so peculiar a phenomenon during Hashish intoxication. During the intervals of confusion or darkness, the lucid moments possess a power and comprehension truly marvellous, so that in a few seconds the most distinct and accurate picture of a range of life, including as much as forty years, may be recast and surveyed. The alternation from obscurity to lucidity is like the effect of a sea-wave; a lucid wave is followed by a dark overhanging wave on which the mind is shipwrecked, and carried with the sensation of a melancholy floating towards forgetfulness and oblivion, to be roused instantly by the passage over it once more of the wave of life and light. The dark waves chase each other so long as they continue, and the mind, unable to continue its thoughts and acts, but bending under a successive series of impressions, the shortest space of time seems to present the duration of an eternity. A seeming extraordinary slowness of time, which struck the observers in so singular a manner, and made them so impatient of delay, that they were continually recurring to their watches, and observing, with a kind of awe, how minutes were transformed into epochs. With this apparently interminable length of time, there seemed to occur a kind of forgetfulness, by which an act of the mind, taking place an interval before, or an impression received some time before, were in a manner forgotten; but, in a few brief moments they returned, or presented themselves, as it were, for the first time and in such manner, almost unaccountably repeated themselves, and reproduced frequently, as now the impressions they reinspired. There was noticed in the observers, so different themselves ordinarily in general character and temperament, a common docility and absence of susceptibility which was most remarkable. Thus one of them gave to another with whom he was but slightly acquainted a series of hard blows on the back, saying that he himself felt nothing of the Hashish, and asking whether the blows he inflicted were felt. On his part, he who received the blows took them all in good humor, uttering no complaint, and seeming, indeed, insusceptible of complaint. Again, one of them, who sat writing, submitted to receive the infliction of two sharp blows, boxes on the ears, and to have his pen snatched out of his hand, without any expression of pain or even annoyance. Reproaches between them for having taken the drug never passed; but each, laughing all the time, tried often, in lucid intervals, to produce sickness. Such was the good humor that prevailed that each one mutually yielded up his own will and obeyed the other; the whole trio joyfully concurring in all that suggested itself to them, as withdrawing them from the idea of danger, and fully agreeing in particulars as to the sensations they experienced. Was seized with melancholy, from which he could rouse himself only by imitating the movements and follies of the others. Then he had a great inclination to laugh, but kept himself free from the obvious action of the drug by going behind his companions. Suddenly he perceived a change in his intellectual faculties, which appeared less obedient to his will, and feeling he should be worse, he began to register his thoughts of what happened to him. Scarcely had he began, than it seemed more important to him to record the follies uttered by one of his companions. He soon felt himself, however, unable to continue, and his hands with difficulty traced unformed characters. Then becoming preoccupied with a scheme which scribblers might think the act of a madman, he with great difficulty wrote a short justification of his conduct in Milanese. He next began to feel a pleasing stupor; his head seemed to dilate, but without strain, gently! gently!. He possessed the use of his senses and mind, but every occupation wearied him. He passively assisted in what was occurring around him, and unable to give any account of it or reason, was able to laugh at all or everything. After about a quarter of an hour, a weakness of his whole body came on, his legs would not support him, his arms became heavy, and he was seized with a kind of fainting similar to that which at times follows loss of blood. He was obliged to throw himself on the sofa, his limbs became rigid, he entirely lost his sensations, becoming cataleptic, and remained for a long time in this state. By degrees his senses partially returned, so that he was enabled to understand and retain some directions given to him, but he became insensible again, and when put to bed a very hot box placed at his feet, which were very cold, produced no impression. By degrees the insensibility or anaesthesia which had pervaded his whole body relaxed in the left half of his body, but remained perfect in the right. His consciousness, which had never entirely left him but for a few brief moments, by degrees returned to its natural state, so that he could recall what had occurred to him and reflect upon his condition. Again, anesthesia extended all over his body, and now was added an automaton-like and rapid movement of the hands, one hand being pressed upon the breast, and rubbed actively on the back with the palm of the other hand; his head also ached, and he had a sensation of weakness. The anesthesia gradually decreased, but the sensibility did not return universally, nor steadily, there being frequent relapses. By turns the right arm or the leg, or the right half of the face, and then all these parts together, would seem petrified, so that he could not move them, and would then relax. As time went on these phenomena were more frequently repeated in the head and face, the change being quick enough to give great pain; when suddenly the mass of his brain, all except a small portion, seemed changed to marble, and appeared to him to possess all the properties of such a substitution; his right eye, for a long time, retained the sensation of marbly hardness. These symptoms, now going, now returning lasted more than thirty-six hours. The mind, meantime, had nor remained idle, but during moments of returned consciousness assisted as a spectator; ideas succeeded each other with such rapidity that they made a short space of time seem very long. These ideas, although more often scattered, had at times an intimate and long connection; thus every person who had ever assisted him he seemed to see for years and years performing all those long and varied series of acts, which might in reality have been performed during such a period, so that he felt convinced that all those years had really passed. He also had a sort of hallucination in which he seemed transported to a place whimsically made of brass; this, he thought, was the vestibule of Mohammed’s paradise, and that he was denied entrance to it. On going out be found himself launched into space, and compelled to describe very rapidly a vast orbit, in a gloomy, painfully breathing, oppressive circle. This painful sensation lasted a long time, and was among the most disagreeable of the experiment. Was a prey to extreme loquacity and mobility of idea; was continually preoccupied with solicitous impressions as to the fate of his companions, for whom he feared the dose of Hashish had been excessive, and might even prove poisonous. After he had taken the drug about six hours he was seized with a sort of gesticulatory convulsions sin the arms and legs, and by degrees his symptoms assumed the appearance of those which characterize hydrophobia. He was possessed with outbreaks of fear at the sight of bright objects, at the sensation of every sharp little breath of air, or the approach of any one; but these exhibitions were momentary only, and he then paid no attention to what had been previously exciting influences. He asked for water, and seized the cup with a trembling and convulsive hand, but carried it to his lips only to thrust it away without drinking, being unable even with the greatest effort to swallow a single draught. Upon this there succeeded a feeling of uneasiness, as though from dryness of the throat, or rather a sensation that the tongue and throat were covered with a dry soft body. An urgent desire to be held, to be guided, and to be taken care of altogether, under the involuntary feeling that, if such protection were not bestowed, he should get out of bed (in which he was by this time laid) to commit some foolish act. Sensation of pressure at the back of the head, before the occurrence of convulsive movements, which changed into an unpleasant feeling of heat, then of cold, in consequence of which his hands were carried automatically to that spot, and held there, as though there were a difficulty in detaching them. There was also a sensation of cramps in the calves of the legs, which rendered the movement of the legs impossible, or caused them to be distended, or to take a sudden jump. Four hours and a half after taking I was sitting with the family, playing the guitar, when one of the tunes, a rather solemn one, seemed suddenly to assume a more melodious character: it gradually increased in grandeur bar after bar, sinking deep in my soul until I was wholly absorbed with it. The words died away and I still went on with the accompaniment; my mind carried the air, and all surrounding objects faded; I lived wholly in the music, and a deep subdued joyous feeling, such as I never before felt, pervaded my whole being. At last I came to myself somewhat, and turned to the others and remarked that it was beautiful, and asked if they did not think so. They were much surprised at the question, and said it possessed very little merit. I was now surprised in my turn and began to argue its merits, offering to play it over. At this moment a strange crawling sensation commenced in my body, it extended to my limbs, down my arms, to my fingers’ ends, and up into my brain; it travelled slowly, yet so powerful was it that I was wholly overcome with surprise. I was a little alarmed at the feeling, but immediately the word “Hashish” passed through my mind. Ah! that was it, that was the enchanter that made;my music sound so sweet. I was glad to find it had not failed; I was reassured; it was undoubtedly the legitimate effect of the drug. All these things were very nice, but yet the thrill was a thing I had not expected, and another and another following in close succession, I began to wish the last dose had been as ineffectual as the first. I commenced considering what was best to be done. I could not decide whether to sit still or go to my room. I tried to play, but an apparent ebullition in the air prevented me from seeing the notes; the thrills were growing stronger every moment, and I concluded I had best leave the room lest I should do something foolish. I arose abruptly, and with guitar in one hand and music- stand in the other, I sallied forth to go down stairs. No sooner did I commence to move than the thrills increased; stronger and stronger they came closer and closer they succeeded each other, until one ceased not until an almost overwhelming thrill gave notice of another’s birth. In going down stairs my mind ever and anon would wander to other matters and things, and when I recalled my thoughts to what was immediately before me I wondered to find myself still going down stairs. Then a feeling of dread uncertainty seized me, “Shall I ever reach the bottom?” I doubted that I would, yet my reason told me I was going right; so I pressed on. I put my guitar away safely and this reassured me. I say reassured, because I had begun to doubt that any of the things around me had existence, but I reasoned that I had succeeded in finding the guitar-box, and hence some things must exist, and, as I had seen one right, so it was likely all existed. Still I was uncertain that I maintained control of my faculties and motive powers; an intuitive assurance, however, made me depend on them, and I determined to go quietly upstairs to my room; I went up very quietly; indeed, I seemed not to touch the steps; I trod the air as a swimmer treads water; my feet came near the steps but did not strike them. I reached my room, but what to do now; it did not improve my condition. I determined to lie down until the thrills went off which I thought would certainly be very soon, and then I expected other effects to follow. I threw myself on the bed, but immediately sprang to my feet again, for no sooner did I lie down than I thought of catalepsy being sometimes produced by the use of the drug; no, I must not lie down; I must keep my soul in my body by force of will, or perhaps it would never return, and I felt that it was trying to wing itself away. As the extract was strong and so small an amount had produced so great an effect, I was afraid I had taken too great a dose, and became alarmed lest it should play me foul. The thrills had now become continuous, the commencing of each being only known by an increase in their force; my heart and veins began to throb violently, the blood began to rush to my head, and I feared apoplexy. My tongue became coated with saliva, and I thought my body was dissolving into fluids. I spit from the window. I afterwards thought it was foolish for me to do so as I might jump from the window, for I felt certain I did not possess the full command of my faculties. The uncertain aspect of things now increased, with the whole force of my reason seemingly unimpaired. I could not convince myself the furniture in the room had other than an ideal existence; this feeling was so oppressive that I determined to seek the rest of the family. But how could I reach them? I was in another sphere; I had journeyed to a world whose objects I could not realize, an uncertain world whose paths I did not know. An atmosphere surrounded my little world through which I could not pass; to break through the open doorway seemed as impossible as to wing my way through the ethereal regions to the throne above. This was my station; here I must remain. A feeling of loneliness now overwhelmed me. I must seek the rest of the family. I hurled my body through the seemingly impenetrable though invisible barrier. On, on, I went, pushing my way thorough a resistant atmosphere, or surrounding, which was a creation of my state. I know not how to express the feeling of this existence; there is not type among natural things to which I can compare it; an ethereal fluid it seemed to be, not dense as water nor rare as air, yet it resisted, and I by force of will overcame it step by step. Here I noticed the two parts of my being acting separately; my will or spiritual existence was separate from my bodily existence, and spurring it onward, pushing it forwards and using it much as an artificer uses a tool; onward it forced my body, seeming to exult in its supremacy. I cannot say whether my feelings at this time were more oppressed or buoyant, for while my mind seemed oppressed by the appearance of the objects along my route, and fear of injury from the effect of the drug, my soul was exultant as though in a more congenial atmosphere, and glad of its partial disenthralment. I at last reached the room I sought; so long a time seemed to have elapsed since I had been last there, that I did not expect to see the family there; it was impossible for me to keep any record of time, but it seemed as though I had been a long time away, and I expected to find the room tenantless; so certain was I that this would be the case that I was surprised to see them seated as I had left them. When I saw them, for an instant I thought they were really there, but it was only for an instant; they immediately assumed the same unreal appearance which other things held. I had determined that I would say nothing about my having taken the drug to the others for fear of frightening them, though I had told them I intended to take it. I did not doubt I could control my tongue, but things about me seemed so unreal, and they were so silent, that I could not restrain myself; I must speak to them, and see if they are really here, but what should I say? I rummaged my brain for a question to ask, but could think of nothing but “Hashish”. This I did not wish to speak of, but nothing else would come to my mind, I must say something, for I could bear this feeling no longer. Then my reason told me it was best that they should know I had taken the drug, as they would then know how to treat me if any dangerous symptoms occurred, so I opened my mouth and said, “I have taken Hashish”. My voice appeared strange to me; it seemed as though another person spoke; I looked around; my words had made no impression on those around me; is it possible they can sit silent? I had thought they would have all sprang to their feet, so suicidal did it appear to me for one to take the drug. “I had forgotten,” thought I; “they do not know the nature of the drug”. I explained to them that it was the drug I had spoken to them of shortly before; I told them of its effects; how everything, even themselves, seemed unreal; that I did not feel certain that I was even in the room with them; they all looked up and smiled, and again resumed their former positions without saying a word. This was agonizing; were these only the phantoms of my friends that I had called up? “Speak to me, I cried; “speak to me, or I will go crazy. I think I see you here; I appear to be in the room with you, yet so uncertain does everything look that I cannot convince myself that it is so. Speak to me, that I may be assured that at least I am not deceived in this”. Some one answered me; I heard the voice, it seemed familiar, yet it was the phantom that spoke; all was still unreal; I myself was unreal, even my voice did not seem my own. I tried to reassure myself by conversing with them. I saw they knew not how I felt. An irresistible desire to make them know how I felt now seized me; this I felt was impossible; they had now no fellow-feeling with me. I was alone; no earthly being could sympathize with me; I was the impossibility of making them understand me, yet I must make the attempt; I told them all my feelings; they seemed to think it only imagination, and that I was only using symbols to represent them; my feelings, were hurt, and I almost wept; it seemed as if they doubted my word. I now began to think over my past actions while in this state; it seemed to me a dream; I could not believe I had been upstairs, or even out of the room; no, I had fallen asleep with my guitar in my hand, and had dreamed I was upstairs. I looked for my guitar; it was not there; certainly then I must have put it away, or else I was dreaming yet; perhaps I had gone to bed at night and been dreaming all along, making a full day’s work of dreaming. I became convinced that this was so, but I immediately thought of the Hashish, which dispelled the illusion; I then asked how long I had been absent from the room; I was answered, “About five minutes;” it had seemed to me as many hours. I asked how I looked; was told, “pale, eyes half-closed and dull, and my hands were cold and clammy”. I now felt a resinous matter exude from every pore of my body; it lined my mouth and throat, creating a great thirst. I got a glass of water and drank it; it seemed to form a continuous stream, and ran down my throat by its own gravity without any aid from me. I became afraid to drink any more; immediately on ceasing to drink it seemed to me that the water had formed itself into one bolus and gone down my throat within an atmosphere of its own, without touching either side. So everything appeared different after I had done it from what it did while I was doing. I would sometimes make a remark which I would think of the greatest importance, and speak it in a very impressive manner that it might not be lost; immediately it would be figured to me as that of another, and I would have to smile at the foolish fellow for making so ridiculous a remark. At one time I felt constrained to let all my thoughts be known. I would think of a thing, digest it in my mind, and then with a pompous air; would make it known to those about me, something as follows: I was thinking of my thirst and feelings together, and suddenly broke forth with, “This drug is acting very strangely; it is operating upon the fluids of my body; it decomposes my blood, throwing off the equivalents of water, the oxygen being thrown off at the + poles, the hydrogen at the – poles, and the electricity produced by the decomposition as well as by the reunion of these gases, as they escape through the pores in the form of perspiration, acts upon my nerves and produces this strange feeling; my stomach is the battery, Hashish the acid, and my nerves the conductors”. My tongue seemed to be under the control of my will, and things I thought best left unsaid I could generally keep to myself. My ideas of the propriety of things, however, were at times quite different from what they were in the natural state. After pacing the room (which I did continually to assure myself I still could move), I stopped suddenly, and turning to a sister, I told her what I thought to be a grand discovery, clothed in the choicest language the English tongue could admit of: “This Hashish,” said I, “acts upon the urinary glands, and I feel that could I pass water I would feel better”. This was not received as reverently as it should have been, which called forth a lecture on propriety from me, much to the amusement of the rest. I then began a censorship of my own conduct. I began noting my manner of walking and talking, at one time asking if I did not look like Mr. C., consequential; at another, like Mr. F., a nervous individual; and again, if I did not act like a Mr. C., a crazy man, remarking that I thought the last named had taken Hashish. The others now became alarmed at my strange actions, and procured for me an emetic. I laughed at them, and told them it was no use, I had taken the drug early in the morning. They then brought a mixture of ether, camphor, etc.; I told them it would only make matters worse; I took it, however, at their persuasion. It put me for awhile in awful agony without taking away my strange feelings, and when its first effects passed off left me extremely melancholy. I gave up hope of coming back to my right state of mind. I asked them to send to the doctor for an antidote, being satisfied by their answering that they would if I grew worse. I turned my thoughts to what the doctor would say. “What,” said I, “if the doctor should say I would never recover; minutes seem years, what an eternity of madness would there be before me then; to know that I must die in my madness at last, how awful!” I could not bear the thought. At the suggestion of the others I went to the parlor, they thinking it would be more cheerful. As sit became dark, I became more melancholy. I said that if God did not will that the antidote should be effective, it would not be effective, but if he willed it to be so, so it would be; suppose we go to God at once, instead of going for the antidote. “There is no use,” said I, “of me praying, as I cannot tell whether I am talking or not; besides, God would not hear the prayer of a crazy man; you are in your right senses, one of you pray for me”. We knelt down, but the prayer being on the wrong subject, I in disgust turned my thoughts to other matters, and talked of other things until supper-time. As I entered the room the light fell full upon me. How beautiful did that light appear; all my melancholy feelings at once left me; I felt a dark shadow lifted from my soul, and all was light within. The light penetrated through my body. I seemed transparent; I could almost look into my own body and see the various organs thereof, all of which seemed to me to be reflecting from their surface a calm lustre, which filled my whole soul. On turning myself to eat, I thought everything had something hurtful in it. I could not eat meat, because it had chloride of sodium on it, nor eat bread, because the butter was too strong a stimulant. Being persuaded, however, I ate a piece of meat; to do so I had to call to mind the various processes and modus operandi of “feeding”. “First,” I reasoned, “they put the substance in the mouth, and by moving the under jaw down and up and mixing the saliva with it by motion of the tongue, they masticate it”. This was easily accomplished. The spittle seemed to have legs and arms, and I could feel it scrambling through the meat, abut when it was thoroughly masticated, I could not remember, or rather could not date back to the time I put the meat in my mouth; chewing seemed to have been my regular business for some time past. It was time now to swallow it; here was a great difficulty. I could move my jaws at will, but to get command of the muscles of;my throat wholly baffled all my endeavors. At last I made a sort of compromise. “They throw the bolus back on the tongue, press the tongue on the roof of the mouth, the bolus slides back, irritates the muscles of the pharynx, and down it goes”. I tried this, it succeeded admirably, and I applauded myself for my good generalship. A friend called to see me after supper; I determined to keep myself rational while he remained, by force of my will, which I found I could do. At this time the sedative you sent reached me; I took it, and afterwards went to the piano and played until the thrills went off. I had perfect control of my fingers, excepting when I tried to vary a piece I knew well, in which case I could not play anything but the proper;notes of the piece, my fingers being drawn to the keys either by force of custom or by tenor of the tune. The full effect of the drug did not go off for a week, and even during the next succeeding week I brought back the thrills strongly by taking hot stimulants, though they lasted but a few seconds and brought no hallucinations. A shock, as of some unimaginable vital force, shoots without warning through my entire frame, leaping to my fingers’ ends, piercing my brain, startling me till I almost spring from my chair. No pain anywhere, not a twinge in any fibre, yet a cloud of unutterable strangeness was settling upon me, and wrapping me impenetrably in from all that was natural or familiar. Endeared faces, well known to me of old, surrounded;me, yet they were not with me in my loneliness. I had entered upon a tremendous life which they could not share. If the disembodied ever return to hover over the hearthstone which once had a seat for them, they look upon their friends as I then looked upon mine. A nearness of place with an infinite distance of state, a connection which had no possible sympathies for the wants of that hour of revelation, an isolation none the less perfect for seeming companionship. Yet is was not my voice which spoke; perhaps one which I once had far away in another time and another place. For awhile I knew nothing that was going on externally, and then the remembrance of the last remark which had been made returned slowly and indistinctly, as some trait of a dream will return after many days, puzzling us to say where we have been conscious of it before(130). A fitful wind all the evening had been sighing down the chimney; it now grew into the steady hum of a vast wheel in accelerating motion. For awhile this hum seemed to resound through all space. I was stunned by it, I was absorbed in it. Slowly the revolution of the wheel came to a stop, and its monotonous din was changed for the reverberating peal of a grand cathedral organ. The ebb and flow of its inconceivably solemn tone filled me with a grief that was more than human. I sympathized with the dirge-like cadence, as spirit sympathizes with spirit. And then, in the full conviction that all I heard and felt was real, I looked out of my isolation to see the effect of the music on my friends. Ah! we were in separate worlds indeed. Not a trace of appreciation on any face. As mechanically as an automaton I began to reply. As I heard once more the alien and unreal tones of my own voice, I became convinced that it was some one else who spoke, and in another world. I sat and listened; still the voice kept speaking. Now, for the first time, I experienced that vast change which Hashish makes in all measurements of time. The first word of the reply occupied a period sufficient for the action of a drama; the last left me in complete ignorance of any point for enough back in the past to date the commencement of the sentence. Its enunciation might have occupied years. I was not in the same life which had held me when I heard it begun. And now with time, space expanded also. At my friend’s house one particular arm-chair was always reserved for me. I was sitting in it at a distance of hardly three feet from the center-table, around which the members of the family were grouped. Rapidly that distance widened. The whole atmosphere seemed ductile, and spun endlessly out into great spaces surrounding me on every side. We were in a vast hall, of which my friends and I occupied opposite extremities. The ceiling and the walls ran upward with a gliding motion, as if vivified by a sudden force of resistless growth. Oh! I could not bear it. I should soon be left alone in the midst of an infinity of space. And now every moment increased the conviction that I was watched. I did not know then, as I learned afterwards, that suspicion of all earthly things and persons was the characteristic of the Hashish delirium. In the midst of my complicated hallucination, I could perceive that I had a dual existence. One portion of me was whirled unresistingly along the track of this tremendous experience, the other sat looking down from a height upon its double, observing, reasoning, and serenely weighing all the phenomena. This calmer being suffered with the other by sympathy, but did not lose its self-possession. Presently it warned me that I must go home, lest the growing effect of the Hashish should incite me to some act which might frighten my friends. I acknowledged the force of this remark very much as if it had been made by another person, and rose to take my leave. I advanced towards the center-table. With every step the distance increased. I nerved myself as for a long pedestrian journey. Still the lights, the faces, the furniture receded. At last, almost unconsciously, I reached them. It would be tedious to attempt to convey the idea of time which my leave-taking consumed, and the attempt, at least, with all minds that have not passed through the same experience would be as impossible as tedious. At last I was in the street. Beyond me the view stretched endlessly away. It was an unconverging vista, whose nearest lamps seemed separated from me be leagues. I was doomed to pass through a merciless stretch of space. A soul just disenthralled, setting out for his flight beyond the farthest visible star, could not be more overwhelmed with his newly acquired conception of the sublimity of distance than I was at that moment. Solemnly I began my infinite journey. Before long I walked in entire unconsciousness of all around me. I dwelt in a marvellous inner world I existed by turns in different places and various states of being. Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons of Venice. Now Alp on Alp towered above my view, and the glory of the coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle. Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest I spread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in the spice-gales over a river whose waves at once sent up clouds of music and perfume. My soul changed to a vegetable essence, thrilled with a strange and unimaginable ecstasy. The palace of Al Haroun could not have brought me back to humanity. I will not detail all the transmutations of that walk. Ever and anon I returned from my dreams into consciousness, as some well- known house seemed to leap out into my path, awaking me with a shock. the whole way homeward was a series of a such awaking and relapses into abstraction and delirium until I reached the corner of the street in which I lived. My sensations began to be terrific, not form any pain that I felt, but from the tremendous mystery of all around me and within me. By an appalling introversion, all the operations of vitality which, in our ordinary state, go on unconsciously, came vividly into my experience. Through every thinnest corporeal tissue and minutest vein I could trace the circulation of the blood along each inch of its progress. I knew when every valve opened and when it shut; every sense was preternaturally awakened; the room was full of a great glory. The beating of my heart was so clearly audible that I wondered to find it unnoticed by those who were sitting by my side. Lo, now, that heart became a great fountain, whose jet played upward with loud vibrations, and, striking upon the roof of my skull as on a gigantic dome, fell back with a splash and echo into its reservoir. Faster and faster came the pulsations, until at last I heard them, no more, and the stream became one continuously pouring flood, whose roar resounded through all my frame. I gave myself up for lost, since judgment, which still sat unimpaired above my perverted senses, argued that congestion must take place in a few moments, and close the drama with my death. But my clutch would not yet relax from hope. the thought struck me, might not this rapidity of circulation be, after all, imaginary? I determined to find out. Going to my own room, I took out my watch, and placed my hand upon my heart. The very effort which I made to ascertain the reality gradually brought perception back to its natural state. In the intensity of my observations, I began to perceive that the circulation was not as rapid as I had thought. From a pulseless flow it gradually came to be apprehended as a hurrying succession of intense throbs, then less swift and less intense, till finally, on comparing it with the second-hand, I found that about 90 minute was its average rapidity. Greatly comforted, I desisted from the experiment. Almost instantly the hallucination returned. Again I dreaded apoplexy, congestion, hemorrhage, a multiplicity of nameless deaths, and drew my picture as I might be found on the morrow, stark and cold, by those whose agony would be redoubled by the mystery of my end. I reasoned with myself; I bathed my forehead; it did no good. There was one resource left; I would go to a physician. With this resolve, I left my room and went to the head of the staircase. The family had all retired fro the night, and the gas was turned off from the burner in the hall below. I looked down the stairs; the depth was fathomless; it was a journey of years to reach the bottom! The dim light of the sky shone through the narrow panes at the sides of the front door, and seemed a demon-lamp in the middle darkness of the abyss. I never could get down! I sat me down despairingly upon the topmost step. Suddenly a sublime thought possessed me. It shall be tried. I commenced the descent, wearily, wearily down through my league- long journey. To record my impressions in that journey would be to repeat what I have said of the time of Hashish. Now stopping to rest, as a traveller would turn aside at a wayside inn, now toiling down through the lonely darkness, I came by and by to the end, and passed out into the street. On reaching the porch of the physician’s house I rang the bell, but immediately forgot whom to ask for. No wonder; I was on the steps of a palace in Milan no (and I laughed at myself for the blunder), I was on the staircase of the Tower of London. So I should not be puzzled through my ignorance of Italian. But whom to ask for?This question recalled me to the real bearings of the place, but did not suggest its requisite answer. Whom shall I ask for? I began setting the most cunning traps of hypothesis to catch the solution of the difficulty. I looked at the surrounding houses; of whom had I been accustomed to thing as living next door to them? This did not bring it. Whose daughter had been going to school from this house but the very day before? Her name was Julia-Julia-and I thought of every combination which had been made with this name from Julia Domna down to Giulia Grisi. Ah! now I had it, Julia H.; and her father naturally bore the same name. During this intellectual rummage, I had rung the bell half a dozen times, under the impression that I was kept waiting a small eternity. When the servant opened the door she panted as if she had run for her life. My voice seemed to reverberate like thunder from every recess in the whole building. I was terrified at the noise I had made. I learned in after days that this impression is only one of the many due to the intense sensibility of the sensorium as produced by Hashish. At one time, having asked a friend to check me if I talked loudly or immoderately while in a state of fantasia, among persons from whom I wished to conceal my state, I caught myself singing and shouting from very ecstasy, and reproached him with a neglect of his friendly office. I could not believe him when he assured me that I had not uttered an audible word. The intensity of the inward motion had affected the external through the internal ear. All was perfect silence in the room, and had been perfect darkness also, but for the small lamp which I held in my hand to light the preparation of the powder when it should come. And now a still sublimer mystery began to enwrap me. I stood in a remote chamber at the top of a colossal building, and the whole fabric beneath me was steadily growing into the air. Higher than the topmost pinnacle of Bel’s Babylonish temple-higher than Ararat-on, on forever into the lonely dome of God’s infinite universe we towered ceaselessly. The years flew on; I heard the musical rush of their wings in the abyss outside of me, and from cycle to cycle, from life to life I careered, a mote in eternity and space. Suddenly emerging form the orbit of my transmigrations, I was again at the foot of the doctor’s bed, and thrilled with wonder that we were both unchanged by the measureless lapse of time. The thought struck me that I would compare my time with other people’s I looked at my watch, found that its minute-hand stood at the quarter mark past eleven, and, returning it to my pocket, abandoned myself to my reflections. Presently I saw myself a gnome, imprisoned by a most weird enchanter, whose part I assigned to the doctor before me, in the Domdaniel caverns, “under the roots of the ocean”. Here, until the dissolution of all thing, was I doomed to hole the lamp that lit that abysmal darkness, while my heart, like a giant clock, ticked solemnly the remaining years of time. Now, this hallucination departing, I heard in the solitude of the night outside the sound of a wondrous heaving sea. Its waves, in sublime cadence, rolled forward till they wet the foundations of the building; they smote them with a might which made the topstone quiver, and then fell back, with hiss and hollow murmur, into the broad bosom whence they had risen. Now through the street, with measured tread, an armed host passed by. The heavy beat of their footfalls, and the grinding of their brazen corset- rings along broke the silence, for among them all there was no more speech not music than in a battalion of the dead. It was the army of the ages going by into eternity. A godlike sublimity swallowed up my soul. I was overwhelmed in a fathomless barathrum of time, but I leaned on God, and was immortal through all changes. And now, in another life, I remembered that far back in the cycles I had looked at my watch to measure the time through which I passed. The impulse seized me to look again. The minute- hand stood half way between fifteen and sixteen minutes past eleven. The watch must have stopped; I held it to my ear; no, it was still going. I had travelled through all that immeasurable chain of dreams in thirty seconds. ‘My God!” I cried, “I am in eternity”. In the presence of that first sublime revelation of the soul’s own time, and her capacity for an infinite life, I stood trembling with breathless awe. Till I die, that moment of unveiling will stand in clear relief from all the rest of my existence. I hold it still in unimpaired remembrance as one of the unutterable sanctities of my being. The years of all my earthly life to come can never be as long as those thirty seconds. The moment that I closed my eyes a vision of celestial glory burst upon me. I stood on the strand of a translucent, boundless lake, across whose bosom I seemed to have been just transported. A short way up the beach a temple, modelled like the Parthenon, lifted it spotless and gleaming columns of alabaster sublimely into the rosy sir, like the Parthenon, yet as much excelling it as the godlike ideal of architecture must transcend that ideal realized by man. Unblemished in its purity of whiteness, faultless in the unbroken symmetry of every line and angle, its pediment was draped in odorous clouds, whose tints outshone the rainbow. It was the work of an unearthly builder, and my soul stood before it in a trance of ecstasy. Its folded doors were resplendent with the glory of a multitude of eyes of glass, which were inlaid, throughout the marble surfaces, at the corners of diamond figures, from the floor of the porch to the topmost moulding. One of these eyes was golden like the midday sun, another emerald, another sapphire, and thus onward through the whole gamut of hues, all of them set in such collocations as to form most exquisite harmonies, and whirling upon their axes with the rapidity of thought. At the mere vestibule of the temple I could have sat and drunk in ecstasy forever; but lo! I am yet more blessed. On silent hinges the doors swing open, and I pass in. I did not seem to be in the interior of a temple. I beheld myself as truly in the open air as if I had never passed the portals, for whichever way I looked there were no walls, no roof, no pavement. An atmosphere of fathomless and soul-satisfying serenity surrounded and transfused me. I stood upon the bank of a crystal stream, whose waters, as they slid on, discoursed notes of music which tinkled on the ear like the tones of some exquisite bell-glass. The same impression which such tones produce, of music refined to its ultimate ethereal spirit and borne from a far distance, characterized every ripple of those translucent waves. The gently sloping banks of the stream were luxuriant with a velvety cushioning of grass and moss, so living green that the eye and soul reposed on them at the same time, and drank in peace. Through this amaranthine herbage strayed the gnarled, fantastic roots of giant cedars of Lebanon, form whose primeval trunks great branches spread above me, and interlocking, wove a roof of impenetrable shadow; and wandering down the still avenues, below those grand arboreal arches, went glorious bards, whose snowy beards fell on their breasts beneath countenances of ineffable benignity and nobleness. The were all clad in flowing robes like God’s high priests, and each one held in his hand a lyre of unearthly workmanship. Presently one stops midway down a shady walk, and, baring his right arm, begins a prelude. While his celestial chords are trembling up into their sublime fullness, another strikes his strings, and now they blend upon my ravished ear in such a symphony as was never heard elsewhere, and such as I shall never hear again out of the Great Presence. A moment more, and three are playing in harmony; now the fourth joins the glorious rapture of his music to their own, and in the completeness of the chord my soul is swallowed up. I can bear no more. But yes, I am sustained, for suddenly the whole throng break froth in a chorus, upon whose wings I am lifted out of the riven walls of sense, and music and spirit thrill in immediate communion. Forever rid of the intervention of pulsing air and vibrating nerve, my soul dilates with swell of that transcendent harmony, and interprets from it arcana of a meaning which words can never tell. I am borne aloft upon the glory of sound. I float in a trance among the burning choir of the seraphim. But, as I am melting through the purification of that sublime ecstasy into oneness with the deity himself, one by one those pealing lyres faint away, and as the last throb dies down along the measureless ether, visionless arms swiftly as lightning carry me far into the profound, and set me down before another portal. Its leaves, like the first, are of spotless marble, but ungemmed with wheeling eyes of burning color. I will make a digression, for the purpose of introducing two laws of the Hashish operation, which, as explicatory, deserve a place here. First; after the completion of any one fantasia had arrived, there almost invariably succeeds a shifting of the action to some other stage entirely different in its surroundings. In this transition the general character of the emotion may remain unchanged. I may be happy in paradise, and happy at the sources of the Nile, but seldom, either in Paradise or on the Nile, twice in succession. I may writhe in Etna and burn unquenchably in Gehenna, but almost never, in the course of the same delirium, shall Etna of Gehenna witness my torture a second time. Second; after the full storm of a vision of intense sublimity has blown past a Hashish eater, his next vision is generally of a quiet, relaxing, and recreating nature. He comes down from his clouds or up from his abyss into a middle ground of gentle shadows, where he may rest his eyes from the splendour of the seraphim of the flames of fiends. There is a wise philosophy in this arrangement, for otherwise the soul would soon burn out in the excess of its own oxygen. Many a time it seems to me had my own thus been saved from extinction. Although the last experience of which I had been conscious had seemed to satisfy every human want, physical or spiritual, I smiled on the four plain white walls of my bed chamber, and hailed their familiar unostentatiousness with a pleasure which had no wish to transfer itself to arabesque or rainbows. It was like returning home from an eternity spent in loneliness among the palaces of strangers. Well may I say an eternity, for during the whole day I could not rid myself of the feeling that I was separated from the preceding one by an immeasurable lapse of time. In fact, I never got wholly rid of it. Every function had returned to its normal state, with the one exception mentioned; memory could not efface the traces of my having passed through a great mystery. The phenomenon of the dual existence once more presented itself. One part of me awoke, while the other continued in perfect hallucination. The awakened portion felt the necessity of keeping in side streets on the way home, lest some untimely burst of ecstasy should startle more frequented thoroughfares. And now that unutterable thirst which characterizes Hashish came upon me. I could have lain me down and lapped dew from the grass. I must drink, where so ever, howsoever. We soon reached home; soon, because it was not five squares off where we sat down, yet ages, from the thirst which consumed me, and the expansion of time in which I lived. I came into the house as one would approach a fountain in a desert, with a wild bound of exultation, and gazed with miserly eyes at the draught which my friend poured out for me until the glass was brimming. I clutched it; I put it to my lips. Ha! a surprise. It was not water, but the most delicious metheglin in which ever bard of the Cymri drank the health of Howell Dda. It danced and sparkled like some liquid metempsychosis of amber; it gleamed with the spiritual fire of a thousand chrysolites. To sight, to taste it was metheglin, such as never mantled in the cups of Valhalla. After the walk which I last recorded, the former passion for travel returned with powerful intensity. I had now a way of gratifying it, which comported both with indolence and economy. The whole East, from Greece to farthest China, lay within the compass of a township. No outlay was necessary for the journey. For the humble sum of six cents I might purchase an excursion ticket over all the earth; ships and dromedaries, tents and hospices, were all contained in a box of Tilden’s extract. Hashish I called the “drug of travel,” and I had only to direct my thoughts strongly towards a particular part of the world previously to swallowing my bolus, to make my whole fantasia in the strongest possible degree topographical. Or, when the delirium was at its height, let any one suggest to me, however faintly, mountain, wilderness, or marker-place, and straightaway I was in it, drinking in the novelty of my surroundings in all the ecstasy of a discoverer. I swam up against the current of all time; I walked through Luxor and Palmyra as they were of old; on Babylon the bitter had not built her nest, and I gazed on the unbroken columns of the Parthenon. There are two facts which I have verified as universal by repeated experiment, which fall into their place here as aptly as they can in the course of my narrative. 1st. At two different times, when body and mind are apparently in precisely analogous states, when all circumstances, exterior and interior do not differ tangibly in the smallest respect, the same dose of the same preparation of Hashish will frequently produce diametrically opposite effects. Still further, I have taken at one time a pill of thirty grains, which hardly gave a perceptible phenomenon, and at another, when my dose had been but half that quantity, I have suffered the agonies of a martyr, or rejoiced in a perfect frenzy. So exceedingly variable are its results that, long before I abandoned the indulgence, I took each successive bolus with the consciousness that I was daring an uncertainty as tremendous as the equipoise between hell and heaven. Yet the fascination employed Hope as its advocate, and won the suit. 2D. If, during the ecstasy of Hashish delirium, another dose, however small, yes, though it be no larger than half a pea, be employed to prolong the condition, such agony will inevitably ensue as will make the soul shudder at its own possibility of endurance without annihilation. By repeated experiments, which now occupy the most horrible place upon my catalogue of horrible remembrances, have I proved that, among all the variable phenomena of Hashish, this alone stands unvarying. The use of it directly after any other stimulus will produce consequences as appalling. The effects of the Hashish increased, as it always does, with the excitement of the visions and the exercise of walking. I began to be lifted into that tremendous pride which is so often a characteristic of the fantasia. My powers became superhuman; my knowledge covered the universe; my scope of sight was infinite. What mattered it that my far-off battlements were the walls of a college, my mighty plain a field and my wind of balm but an ordinary sunset breeze? To me all joys were real; yes, even with a reality which utterly surpasses the hardest facts of the ordinary world. Upon William N., Hashish produced none of the effects characteristic of fantasia. There was no hallucination, no volitancy of unusual images before the eye when closed. Circulation, however, grew to a surprising fullness and rapidity, accompanied by the same introversion of faculties and clear perception of all physical processes which startled me in my first experiment upon myself. There was stertorous breathing, dilatation of the pupil, and a drooping appearance of the eyelid, followed at last by a comatose state, lasting for hours, our of which it was almost impossible fully to arouse the energies. These symptoms, together with a peculiar rigidity of the muscular system, and inability to measure the precise compass and volume of the voice when speaking, brought the case nearer in resemblance to those recorded by Dr. O’Shaughnessy, of Calcutta, as occurring under his immediate inspection among the native of India than any I have witnessed. Repeatedly have I wandered past doors and houses which, in my ordinary condition, were as well known as my own, and have at last given up the search for them in utter hopelessness, recognizing not the faintest familiar trace in their aspect. Certainly a Hashish-eater should never be alone. In William N., I observed, however, one phenomenon which characterizes Hashish- existence in persons of far different constitutions, the expansion of time and space. Walking with him a distance not exceeding a furlong, I have seen him grow weary and assume a look of hopelessness, which he explained by telling me that he could never traverse the immensity before him. Frequently, also do I remember his asking to know the time thrice in as many minutes, and when answered, he exclaimed, “Is it possible? I supposed it was an hour since I last inquired”. His temperament was a mixture of the phlegmatic and nervous, and he was generally rather insusceptible to stimulus. Suddenly Bob leaped up from the lounge on which he had been lying, and, with loud peals of laughter, danced wildly over the room. A strange light was in his eyes, and he gesticulated furiously, like a player in a pantomime. Suddenly he stopped dancing, and trembling, as with an indefinable fear, he whispered, “What will become of me?”. Having taken Hashish and felt its influence already for several hours, he still retained enough of conscious self-control to visit the room of a certain excellent pianist without exciting the suspicion of the latter. Fred. Threw himself upon a sofa immediately on entering, and asked the artist to play him some piece of music, without naming any one in particular. The prelude began. With its first harmonious rise and fall the dreamer was lifted into the choir of a grand cathedral. Thenceforward it was heard no longer as exterior; but I shall proceed to tell how it was embodied in one of the most wonderful imaginative representations, that it has even been my lot to know. The windows of nave and transept were emblazoned, in the most gorgeous coloring, with incidents culled from saintly lives. Far off in the chancel monks were loading the air with essences that streamed from their golden censers; on the pavement of inimitable mosaic knelt a host of reverent worshippers in silent prayer. Suddenly, behind him, the great organ began a plaintive minor, like the murmur of some bard relieving his heart in threnody. This minor was joined by a gentle treble voice among the choir in which he stood. The low wail rose and fell as with the expression of wholly human emotion. One by one the remaining singers joined in, and now he heard, thrilling to the very roof of the cathedral, a wondrous miserere. But the pathetic delight of hearing was soon supplanted by, or rather mingled with, a new sight in the body of the pile below him. At the father end of the nave a great door slowly swung open, and a bier entered supported by solemn bearers. Upon it lay a coffin covered by a heavy pall, which, being removed as the bier was set down in the chancel, discovered the face of the sleeper. It was the dead Mendelssohn! The last cadence of the death-chant died away; the bearers, with heavy tread, carried the coffin through an iron door to its place in the vault; one by one the crowd passed out of the cathedral, and at last, in the choir, the dreamer stood along. He turned himself also to depart, and, awakened to complete consciousness, beheld the pianist just resting from the keys. “What piece have you been playing?” asked Fred. The musician replied it was “Mendelssohn”s Funeral March”. This piece, Fred. Solemnly assured me, he had never heard before. The phenomenon thus appears inexplicable by any hypothesis which would regard it as a mere coincidence. Whether the vision was suggested by an unconscious recognition of Mendelssohn’s style in the piece performed, or by the awaking of some unknown intuitional faculty, it was produced as an original creation, I know not, but certainly it is as remarkable an instance of sympathetic clairvoyance as I every knew. In the broad daylight of a summer afternoon, I was walking in the full possession of delirium. For an hour the expansion of all visible things had been growing towards its height; it now reached it, and to the fullest extent I apprehended what is meant by the infinity of space. Vistas no longer converged; sight met no barrier; the world was horizon less, for earth and sky stretch endlessly onward in parallel planes. Above me the heavens were terrible with the glory of a fathomless depth. I look up, but my eyes, unopposed, every moment penetrated farther and farther into the immensity, and I turned them downward, lest they should presently intrude into the fatal splendours of the Great Presence. Unable to bear visible objects, I shut my eyes. In one moment, a colossal music filled the whole hemisphere above me, and I thrilled upward through its environment on visionless wings. It was not song, it was not instruments, impossible to be symbolized; intense, yet not loud; the ideal of harmony, yet distinguishable into a multiplicity of exquisite parts. I opened my eyes, but it still continued. I sought around me to detect some natural sound which might be exaggerated into such a semblance; but no, it was of unearthly generation, and it thrilled through the universe an inexplicable, a beautiful, yet an awful symphony. Suddenly my mind grew solemn with the consciousness of a quickened perception. And what a solemnity is that which the Hashish-eater feels at such a movement! The very beating of his heart is silenced; he stands with his finger on his lip; his eyes are fixed, and he becomes a very statue of awful veneration. The face of such a man, however little glorified in feature or expression during his ordinary states of mind, I have stood and looked upon with the consciousness that I was beholding more of the embodiment of the truly sublime, than any created being could ever offer me. I looked abroad on fields, and waters, and sky, and read in the, a most startling meaning. I wondered how I had ever regarded the, in the light of dead matter, at the farthest only suggesting lessons. They were now, as in my former vision, grand symbols of the sublimest spiritual truths-truths never before even feebly grasped, and utterly unsuspected. Like a map the arcana of the universe lay bare before me. I saw how every created thing not only typifies, but springs forth from some mighty spiritual law as its offspring, its necessary external development, not the mere clothing of the essence, but the essence incarnate. As I have frequently said, I felt no depression of body. The flames of my vision had not withered a single corporeal tissue nor snapped a single corporeal cord. All the pains induced by the total abandonment of Hashish were spiritual. From the ethereal heights of Olympus I had been dropped into the midst of an Acherontian fog. My soul breathed laboriously, and grew torpid with every hour. I dreaded an advancing night of oblivion. I sat awaiting extinction. The shapes which moved about me in the outer world seemed liked galvanized corpses; the living soul of nature, with which I had so long communed, had gone out like the flame of a candle, and her remaining exterior was as poor and meaningless as those wooden trees with which children play, and the cliffs and chalets carved out of boxwood by some Swiss in his winter leisure. Moreover, actual pain had not ceased with abandonment of the indulgence. In some fiery dreams of night, or some sudden thrill of daylight, the old pangs were reproduced with a vividness only less than amounting to hallucination. I opened my eyes, I rubbed my forehead, I arose and walked; they were then perceived to be merely ideal; but the very necessity of this effort to arouse myself, a necessity which might occur at any time and in any place, became gradually a grievous thraldom. Constantly, notwithstanding all my occupation of mind, the cloud of dejection deepened in hue and in density. My troubles were not merely negative, simply regrets for something which was not, but a loathing, a fear, a hate of something which was. The very existence of the outer world seemed a base mockery, a cruel sham of some remembered possibility which had been glorious with a speechless beauty. I hated flowers, for I had seen the enamelled meads of Paradise; I cursed the rocks, because they were mute stone; the sky, because it rang with no music; and earth and sky seemed to throw back my curse. An abhorrence of speech or action, except towards the fewest possible persons, possessed me. For the sake of not appearing singular or asthetic, and so crippling my power for whatever little good I might do, I at first mingled with society, forcing myself to laugh and talk conventionalities. At last, associations grew absolutely unbearable; the greatest effort was necessary to speak with any but one or two, to whom I had fully confided my past experience. A footstep on the stairs was sufficient to make me tremble with anticipations of a conversation; every morning brought a resurrection into renewed horrors, as I thought of the advancing necessity of once more coming in contact with men and things. Gradually it grew the habitual tendency of my dreaming state to bring all its scenes, whether of pleasure or of pain, to crisis through some catastrophe by water. Earlier in the state which ensued upon my abandonment of Hashish I had been frightened particularly by seeing men tumble down the shafts of mines, or, as I have detailed, either dreading or suffering some fall into abysses on my own part; yet now, upon whatever journey I set out, to cross the Atlantic or to travel inland, sooner or later I inevitably come to an end by drowning, or the imminent peril of it. Gradually my rest began to be broken by tremendous dreams, that mirrored the sights and echoed the voices of the former Hashish life. In them, I faithfully lived over my past experience, with many additions, and but this one difference.; Out of the reality of the Hashish state there had been no awakening possible; from this hallucination of dreams I awoke when the terrors became too superhuman. The existing mood is heightened. All his feeling of pleasure and pain seem exalted. Feeling of exhilaration (after five hours). The excitement seemed to increase all his powers. “I was bursting with an uncontrollable life; I strode with the thews of a giant”. Cannot say he has any decidedly elated feelings, but only a tendency that way, which he repressed (after eight hours). Elevation of spirits, with a feeling of lightness in the body in the evening. Alarming exaltation, with strange hallucinations. Exaltation of spirits, with excessive loquacity. Exaltation of spirits, with great gayety and disposition to laugh at the merest trifle. For one hour and three-quarters, better humor and lightness of the mind, nearly unmindful of the medicine (after forty-five minutes). Felt very jolly, bursting into laughter; talked nonsense; knew that he was talking nonsense, but could not stop (after one hour). Full of fun and mischief, and laughs immoderately. Everything that he saw seemed ludicrous (after one hour and a half). He whistles and wishes to hug every one he meets. Propensity to caress and chafe the feet of all bystanders. Slight inclination to laugh. Suddenly inclined to laugh; sang alone very joyously; wondered at my own singing. Desire to laugh at every remark made by his companions, because it was so funny. Laughed heartily several times. Laughs indiscriminately at every word said to him. Laughed long and heartily, but never lost the feeling of intense anxiety with which he awoke. Frequent involuntary fits of laughter. Uncontrollable laughter, till face became purple and the back and loins ache. Uncontrollable laughter, and a succession of vivid and pleasurable ideas. Laughed at the idea of laughing, and could not control himself. Spasmodic laughter, seemingly increased by flatulence rising in his throat, threatening to choke him and to make him vomit; there was, however, no nausea. Burst into an immoderate fit of laughter without any cause, and was obliged to retire on account of repeated recurrence of the fits (after two and one-quarter hours).Perpetual giggling. Moaning and crying. Involuntary weeping; the tears seem blood. For a day or two, depression of spirits, and disinclination to study. Great depression of spirits, with weariness, and a pale face. Fits of mental depression. Feels wretched. Very subdued feeling; marked taciturn tendency (after four hours). thinks each one he meets has some secret sorrow, and wishes to sympathize with his. No power of will. His power of will, with regard to the commands of others, seemed intact, but not over himself, except under a strong stimulus, thus, when Mr. H. came into the room, not wishing to be thought drunk, he lay down on a sofa, and could restrain himself from talking by a great effort, but when he did speak to Mr. H., he slightly wandered. When Mr. H. left, he went on as before. Loquacity. Conversed with great volubility; very happy to see them, and begging the, to stay with him, ” as he was at the point of death” (after one hour). Taciturnity. After dinner, the tranquil taciturnity came on. She saw, she observed, she pain attention, but she could not open her mouth to speak. She talked during the early part of the meal, but afterwards lapsed into a tranquil taciturnity. Disposition to remain perfectly quiet, without speaking (after four hours). The anxiety and weakness overcame him to such a degree that he lost all power of will, and his attendants were obliged to hold him up under the arms in order to get him along. Great anguish and despair. Anguish accompanied by great oppression; ameliorated in the open air. He was in constant feat he would become insane. Fear of spectres. Horror of darkness. Great apprehension of approaching death. Dread of “congestion, apoplexy, hemorrhage, and a multiplicity of deaths”. Fear of death, which is thought near. Went upstairs all right; avoided the coal-scuttle, of which he seemed to be somehow afraid. Did not dare to use his voice, in case he should knock down the walls, or burst himself like bomb. Very passionate. Very sarcastic. Felt displeased when his name was called out, at 3 A.M., by a friend, who told him to take care of a coal-scuttle at the foot of the stairs. Extreme intolerance of contradiction. He grows suddenly suspicious of all persons and things. The most delightful ecstasy was converted into deepest horrors, and horrors, when present, were greatly aggravated by darkness. Some had great fear, at times, of things either real or unreal, and at other times the mind wandered into delightful realms. Indifference to the world; the mind seems blunted; a reckless indifference to the dictates of conscience (after seven hours). Intellectual. My mind was capable of a greater effort for a while afterwards. During the succeeding week, I read a work on Psychology of over seven hundred pages, and could for a long while refer to any part of it without my notes. This I could not have done before nor since. He seemed to examine his own character, though in an incomplete manner. Tendency to make puns, and talk about grammatical questions. Thoughts rush so rapidly that it is impossible to write them. Inability to recall any thought or event, on account of different thoughts crowding on his brain. On the next day, he was unable to attend to his business on account of his diffused thoughts, which he was unable to collect. He wished to write down his symptoms, but he had to give up the attempt on account of the wandering of his thoughts. It was only after repeated trials that he made a memorandum, while persons were conversing in the room, on account of his not being able to attend to more than one thing at a time; new ideas would constantly occur to him, which occupied his mind for a short time, when others would rise; all seemed to come in a misty sort of way, and the time elapsing between one train of thought and another, seemed to him long, although really short. His brains seemed cataleptic; he commenced to do something; his fingers moved slowly, a new thought presented itself, which he pursued for awhile, then another would but as though each one stopped there a little while on account of the torpidity of his brain; the slow motion of his fingers seemed to be caused by the cataleptic state of his mind. Very absent-minded. Occasionally absent-minded and dreamy (second day). Pays no attention when spoken to. Answered questions incoherently and immediately forgot what they were about and what I had answered. Wanted to refer to something in his MS.; Had to stop and think what he wanted to fine, and where to look for it; had to think for some seconds before he could bring his mind to the for it; had to think for some seconds before he could bring his mind to the subject (after one and a half hours) (240). Writes one word for another. He could not read, partly on account of dreamy spells, and partly because he had not full power of vision. In the morning, some letters were brought for him, but he could not read or understand them properly (second day). On referring to a MS. Index of cases of poisoning, etc., he did not seem to know where to look for what he wanted; when found, he read it over two or three times without seeming to understand it (after one hour). Stupidity. Stupidity and forgetfulness, and without reverie. Stupid and forgetful (second day). More stupid (second day). His usual forgetfulness improved under the proving. Tales or youth again charmed his existence; pictures and scenes long forgotten were again for an instant as plain as if seen only a day before. Remembered events that had happened, and ideas that had passed through his mind when a child, as about toys. (Does not now remember them distinctly, but recollects that he could then call them to mind). All the thoughts and deeds of his childhood returned. Tried to write down a reference in his MS. Wrote down the first half correctly, though feeling he might write some nonsense in the state he was; on attempting to finish, it, did not know what it was he had to write, and could only to do so by looking constantly at the passage in the printed book while he wrote it down in the MS., and even then omitted something. Memory weak (after one hour and three-quarters). Memory seemed failing him. His memory seemed gone (afterwards, however, he remembered nearly all that had taken place). Great defect and shortness of memory (second day). Forgetful; was not able to recite the simplest sentence. His forgetfulness caused those present to smile, upon which he laughed in a very silly manner. He forgot his last words and ideas, and spoke in a low tone with a thick voice, as if tired. Forgetfulness, then liveliness. He begins a sentence, but cannot finish it, because he forgets what he intends to write or speak. When repeating some French sentences, forgot the beginnings before he came to the endings (after four hours). In conversation, cannot recollect of what he was speaking (after forty-five minutes).Sprang from his bed like a maniac, struck a light, took his watch and began to count his pulse, just one beat at each second; but when the minute had elapsed, could not remember how many he had counted. The most familiar objects appear strange and are not recognized. Felt he knew where he was, and yet did not (after one hour). Cloudiness of internal and external consciousness. He seems as if he had lost his consciousness for a time, which gradually returns. Every few moments he would lose himself, and then wake up, as it were, to those around him. While listening to the piano, he loses consciousness, and is seemingly raised gently through the air to a great height, when the strains of music become perfectly celestial; on regaining consciousness, his head is bent forward, his neck is stiff, and there is a loud ringing in his ears. At night, unconsciousness, delirium, and semi-unconsciousness alternate. He was unconsciousness of a severe chill. Candlelight obliterates all consciousness. Candlelight produces stupefaction of the senses, compression of the brain, paralytic feeling of the whole body; everything appears without color.

TF Allen
Dr. Timothy Field Allen, M.D. ( 1837 - 1902)

Born in 1837in Westminster, Vermont. . He was an orthodox doctor who converted to homeopathy
Dr. Allen compiled the Encyclopedia of Pure Materia Medica over the course of 10 years.
In 1881 Allen published A Critical Revision of the Encyclopedia of Pure Materia Medica.