A well-known instance of suspended animation occurred in the Panjāb in 1837. A Hindū Yogī was there, by his own request, buried alive in a vault for forty days in the presence of Runjit Singh and Sir Claude Wade; his eyes, ears, and every orifice of his body having been first stopped with plugs of wax. Dr. McGregor, the then residency surgeon, also watched the case. Every precaution was taken to prevent deception. English officials saw the man buried, as well as exhumed, and a perpetual guard over the vault was kept night and day by order of Runjit Singh himself. At the end of forty days the disinterment took place. The body was dried up like a stick, and the tongue, which had been turned back into the throat, had become like a piece of horn. Those who exhumed him followed his previously-given directions for the restoration of animation, and the Yogī told them he had only been conscious of a kind of ecstatic bliss in the society of other Yogīs and saints, and was quite ready to be buried over again. What amount of fraud there may be in these feats it is difficult to say. They may possibly be accounted for by the fact that Indian Yogīs have studied the habits of hibernating animals; but in some cases the secret introduction of food has been detected. I may add that it is commonly believed throughout India that a man whose body is sublimated by intense abstract meditation never dies, in the sense of undergoing corruption and dissolution. When his supposed death occurs he is held to be in a state of trance, which may last for centuries, and his body is, therefore, not burnt, but buried—generally in a sitting posture—and his tomb is called a Samādh. With regard to the fifth requisite—the act of withdrawing the senses from their object, as, for example, the eye from visible forms—this is well compared to the act of a tortoise withdrawing its limbs under its shell. The sixth requisite—fixing the principle of thought—comprises the act of directing the thinking faculty (ćitta) towards various parts of the body, for example, towards the heart, or towards the crown of the head, or concentrating the will-force on the region between the two eyebrows, or even fixing the eyes intently on the tip of the nose. (Compare Bhagavad-gītā VI. 13.)