The following night he related how he saw on the Glény road the body of a man, who had been drowned while bathing in the Creuse, and that he was being brought to Guéret in a carriage. Next day I made inquiries, and heard that an inhabitant of the town had really been drowned the previous day at Glény, and that his body had been brought to Guéret during the night. But nobody in the house, not even in the town, had known of the accident the day before.1

M. Simonet, the assistant master, and Janicaud's brother-in-law, once consulted him, when in the somnambulic state, about his child, who had been suffering for some months from a cyst behind the ear, which the doctors feared might result in decay of the bone. Janicaud pronounced their fears groundless, and recommended the use of a certain herb, which grew in the garden, and which he undertook to gather for them.2

But the somnambulist, walking barefoot, accidentally stepped upon a thorn, and the shock woke him before the plant was secured.8

The child recovered soon after, as Janicaud had said it would*....

His health now giving cause for alarm, he was sent home for change and exercise, and while away suffered very few attacks, and these only during the first few days. One which took place two days after joining his family deserves some notice. He rose up during the night with the fixed determination of going fishing. M. Simonet decided to accompany him, and before starting succeeded in inducing him to alter the nature of his excursion, and go and visit a relative residing some distance off. This was done, Janicaud being undisturbed from his sleeping condition either by the noise of barking dogs or by the fatigues of the walk. At last he decided upon going home, and on the way, having come to a narrow and dangerous path by the river, his brother-in-law begged him to be careful as to where he put his foot. Janicaud, however, assured him that he could see the better of the two, and as a proof asked his companion whether he saw the match which was under his left foot. M. Simonet at once felt under his foot, and sure enough found a match there.

Not only was it very dark, but Janicaud with his night-cap drawn over his face was some thirty paces ahead.

1 Facts of the same description are reported by Dr. Macario (Du sommeil, des rêves, et du somnambulisme, 1857), who borrowed them from F. Lebeuf. Here also it is a case of spontaneous somnambulism. (Dr. D).

2 Possibly comfrey, of whose astringent properties Janicaud may have heard. (Dr. D).

3 When he got up in the sleeping state he always dressed himself completely, with the exception of his feet.

Noteworthy, too, were the means which he used to take to free himself from his chain at night. Once with a penknife he cut off a small portion of a window-sash close at hand, and from it modelled a key, with which he easily undid his padlock.

[M. Badaire concludes: - ]

It may not be useless to make an observation of possible interest from a scientific point of view, which is, that during an attack of somnambulism Janicaud is perfectly conscious of the state in which he finds himself. Indeed, he is generally very well pleased at his condition, and if attempts are made to awaken him, begs that it may not be done, as he is so much happier than in his waking state. Nevertheless, after each attack he suffers greatly from fatigue, and his appearance is noticeably altered. Ought this fatigue to be attributed to the extraordinary activities of his faculties during somnambulism, or may it be the result of the shock which he sustains in passing from one state to another?

Once awake, Janicaud has not the least recollection of what has taken place in his somnambulic state. But in each attack he remembers perfectly all that has been said and done in the preceding ones.

In his natural state Janicaud has an uncertain memory, and retains what he learns with difficulty; but on several occasions when he has been studying his history lessons in bed the assistant master has taken the book from his hand, and the somnambulist has then repeated the five or six pages which he had just read without omitting a syllable. Awakened immediately after, he had no recollection of what he had just read and repeated. Badaire.

[Before forwarding his report, M. Badaire had called together the teachers and pupils of the Ecole Normale and had read it aloud to them, asking them if they had any observations to make. All declared it to be scrupulously accurate].

Dr. Pététin, in his Electricité Animate (Paris, 1808), describes a cataleptic patient of his, with remarkable powers of thought-transference. His account (pp. 55-57, and 62-65) of some experiments in which this lady was able to specify objects held in his hand, or inside his coat, or in the pockets of the bystanders, etc, is quoted in Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 345.

Serjeant Cox, in his "Mechanism of Man," vol. ii. pp. 175-7 7 (quoted in Phantasms of the Living, vol. ii. p. 347), gives an account of similar experiments performed by him with his sister when she was in a semiconscious, trance-like state, which used to succeed the cataleptic fits from which she suffered.

In the case of Elizabeth Squirrell there was some indications of clairvoyance (see The Autobiography of Elizabeth Squirt ell of Shottisham and Selections from her Writings: together with an examination and defence of her statements relative to her sufferings, blindness, deafness, entire abstention from food and drink during twenty-five weeks, and other extraordinary phenomena: also facts and opinions illustrative and suggestive. By one of her Watchers. London, 1853).

In the case of Jane Rider (see An Account of Jane C. Rider, the Springfield Somnambulist. By L. W. Belden, M.D., Springfield, Mass., 1834), the phenomena, which seem to have been carefully observed and recorded, do not go clearly beyond hyperæsthesia. Her frequent attacks of spontaneous somnambulism were accompanied by an extraordinary increase in her power of vision, so that she could carry on domestic work, cooking, needlework, etc, rapidly and easily in a quite dark room, and could read fluently, as well as write, with thick bandages over her eyes and on both sides of her nose. But she could only read words within what would have been her field of vision had her eyes been opened and un-bandaged; and she could not read through an opaque obstacle, such as brown paper. Dr. Belden concludes from these facts that she actually saw through the bandages, and puts down her special power of vision to an increased sensibility of the retina, combined with "a high degree of excitement in the brain itself, enabling the mind to perceive even a confused image of the object." He gives in an Appendix the case of Caspar Hauser, of Nuremburg (date about 1828), as recorded by Professor Daumer, in whom not only sight, but all the senses, were heightened to an almost incredible degree. (Cf. 539 A).