Madame de Maceine saw Rubinstein’s hallucinatory picture with the corner of her eye.[22] A shock even as slight as a bit of thistledown blown against the cornea might be ill—­timed at a street-crossing.  Mr. S. of B——­ was run over in the streets of London and killed.  He had been previously hypnotically affected, for he heard quantities of raps; these were no friendly signs of spirits, but the affection of his early hypnotists practising against him.

[Footnote 22:  Vide a leading article, Daily News, July 23.]

A double image is seen, the eye being curiously affected, when for instance the knobs of a chest of drawers appeared through the apparition.

The vision is in the veil or mist of Ibn Khaldoon.  Does not this cast a light upon the conceptive and receptive powers of the eye.  The conceptive power is shown, as Binet and Fere remark, by the fact that our imagination has done away with the end of a nerve which should be seen at every instant of our lives.  Light images may be given by feeble hypnotists of which but the dark reaction can be detected only once in a way.  Compare Binet and Fere.  They are perhaps noted when hypnotic speech does not come off and is not heard.  The small vision in one eye only is separate from the landscape, and practically does not much influence the mind of the person on whom it is inflicted, who continues aware that it is a mere delusion, causing scarcely anything but trifling interruption.  This is perhaps only the case with the few, more numerous however amongst the strong nations than amongst the weaker ones, who are impervious to ordinary hypnotism, or could only be hypnotised if extraordinarily fatigued.

The development of intelligence and perhaps endurance increases the number of these.  I imagine the students in Germany, whom Heidenhain found so superior to our British students, were not only better educated, as is usual, but were also fighting club men, hardened to pain, and very superior to the bulk of their British contemporaries in courage and endurance.

The word skin-deep hypnotism might well be applied to the cases just mentioned.  To show instances of its criminal use.  Hypnotism has been used, there is reason to believe, against an Austrian ambassador in Petersburg, who found his papers in disorder, and saw a pale young man in his study.  Ordering the gates to be closed, he was told by the porter that no one had entered, but that the ghost of the son of a former ambassador—­a lad the writer knew who died at the Embassy—­haunted the house.  The ghost was therefore a hallucination inflicted on the ambassador.  Stepniak’s death at a level-crossing on a railway, might be brought about as Mr. Stewart’s was in the street.  Prince Alexander of Battenburg’s mental prostration might be brought about by the same means when he was kidnapped.