have
produced no visible injury. At the most, they might have caused a
certain degree of internal friction, more or less serious, according to
the thickness of the gum-elastic cuirass which covered the bones and the
various organs."[56]

I am fain to confess, that this imagining of men and women of
gum-elastic, all but the skeleton, does not seem to me so simple a
matter as it appears to have been regarded by M. de Gasparin. Let us
take it for granted that his theory of a nervous fluid, which is the
agent in table-moving,[57] is the true one. How is the mere disengaging
of such a fluid to work a sudden transmutation of muscular and tendinous
fibre and cellular tissue into a substance possessing the essential
properties of a vegetable gum? And what becomes of the skin, ordinarily
so delicate, so easily abraded or pierced, so readily injured? Is that
transmuted also? Let us concede it. But the concession does not suffice.
There remain the bones and cartilages, naturally so brittle, so liable
to fracture. Let us even suppose the breast and stomach of a
convulsionist protected by an artificial coating of actual gum-elastic,
would it be a safe experiment to drop upon it, from a height of twelve
feet, a flint stone weighing fifty pounds? We are expressly told that
the ribs bent under the terrible shock, and sank, flattened, even to the
backbone. Is it not certain, that human ribs and cartilages, in their
normal state, would have snapped off, in spite of the interposed
protection? Must we not, then, imagine osseous and cartilaginous fibre,
too, transmuted? Indeed, while we are about it, I do not see why we
should stop short of the skeleton. Since we understand nothing of the
manner of transmutation, it is as easy to imagine bone turned to
gum-elastic, as skin and muscle and tendon.

In truth, if we look at it narrowly, this theory of De Gasparin is
little more than a virtual admission, that, during convulsion, by some
sudden change, the bodies of the patients did, as they themselves
declared, become, to a marvellous extent, invulnerable,--with the
suggestion added, that the nervous fluid may, after some unexplained
fashion, have been the agent of that change.

For the rest, though the alleged analogy between the properties of
gum-elastic and those which, in this abnormal state, the human body
seems to acquire, is, to a certain extent, sustained by many of the
observations above recorded,--for example, when a sharp-pointed