ffected by means of hypnotism.
Within the last year a lady of beauty and refinement came to me in
serious distress. She confided to me amid a copious effusion of tears
that her husband was upon the verge of insanity. Her testimony was to
the effect that the unfortunate man believed himself to be possessed of
a large library, the fact being that the number of his books was
limited to three hundred or thereabouts.

"Upon inquiry I learned that N. M. (for so I will call the victim of
this delusion) made a practice of reading and of marking booksellers'
catalogues; further investigation developed that N. M.'s great-uncle on
his mother's side had invented a flying-machine that would not fly,
and that a half-brother of his was the author of a pamphlet entitled
'16 to 1; or the Poor Man's Vade-Mecum.'

"'Madam,' said I, 'it is clear to me that your husband is afflicted
with catalogitis.'

"At this the poor woman went into hysterics, bewailing that she should
have lived to see the object of her affection the victim of a malady so
grievous as to require a Greek name. When she became calmer I
explained to her that the malady was by no means fatal, and that it
yielded readily to treatment."

"What, in plain terms," asked Judge Methuen, "is catalogitis?"

"I will explain briefly," answered the doctor. "You must know first
that every perfect human being is provided with two sets of bowels; he
has physical bowels and intellectual bowels, the brain being the
latter. Hippocrates (since whose time the science of medicine has not
advanced even the two stadia, five parasangs of Xenophon)--Hippocrates,
I say, discovered that the brain is subject to those very same diseases
to which the other and inferior bowels are liable.

"Galen confirmed this discovery and he records a case (Lib. xi., p.
318) wherein there were exhibited in the intellectual bowels symptoms
similar to those we find in appendicitis. The brain is wrought into
certain convolutions, just as the alimentary canal is; the fourth
layer, so called, contains elongated groups of small cells or nuclei,
radiating at right angles to its plane, which groups present a
distinctly fanlike structure. Catalogitis is a stoppage of this fourth
layer, whereby the functions of the fanlike structure are suffered no
longer to cool the brain, and whereby also continuity of thought is
interrupted, just as continuity of digestion is prevented by stoppage
of the vermiform appendix.