s
acquaintances inquired after his health, and expressed sympathy for him,
and spoke in terms comforting him. The apparitions were most conversible
when he was alone; nevertheless they mingled in the conversation when
others were by, and their voices had the same sound as those of real
persons. This illusion went on thus from the 24th of February to the
20th of April; so that Nicolai, who was in good bodily health, had time
to become tranquillised about them, and to observe them at his ease. At
last they rather amused him. Then the doctors thought of an efficient
plan of treatment. They prescribed leeches: and then followed the
_denouement_ to this interesting representation. The apparitions became
pale and vanished. On the 20th of April, at the time of applying the
leeches, Nicolai's room was full of figures moving about among each
other. They first began to have a less lively motion; shortly afterwards
their colours became paler--in another half hour fainter still, though
the forms still remained. About seven o'clock in the evening, the
figures had became colourless, and they moved scarcely at all, but their
outline was still tolerably perfect. Gradually that became less and less
defined. At last they disappeared, breaking into air, fragments only
remaining, which at last all vanished. By eight o'clock all were gone,
and Nicolai subsequently saw no more of them.

Other cases are on record in which there was still greater facility of
ghost-production than Nicolai evinced. One patient could, for instance,
by thinking of a person, summon his apparition to join the others. He
could not, however, having done this, subsequently banish him. The sight
is the sense most easily and frequently tricked; next, the hearing. In
some extraordinary cases the touch, also, has participated in the
delusion.

Herr von Baczko, already subject to visual hallucinations, of a diseased
nervous system, his right side weak with palsy, his right eye blind, and
the vision of the left imperfect, was engaged one evening, shortly after
the battle of Jena, as he tells us in his autobiography, in translating
a brochure into Polish, when he felt a poke in his loins. He looked
round, and found that it proceeded from a Negro or Egyptian boy,
seemingly about twelve years of age. Although he was persuaded the whole
was an illusion, he thought it best to knock the apparition down, when
he felt that it offered a sensible resistance. The Negro then attacked