This stage lasts usually but a short time, and the patient, under ordinary conditions, will pass upward into the stage of catalepsy, in which he opens his eyes. If the hypnotism is spontaneous, that is, if it is due to a condition of the nervous organism which has produced it without any outside aid, we have the condition of prolonged trance, of which many cases have been reported. Until the discovery of hypnotism these strange trances were little understood, and people were even buried alive in them. A few instances reported by medical men will be interesting. There is one reported in 1889 by a noted French physician. Said he: “There is at this moment in the hospital at Mulhouse a most interesting case. A young girl twenty-two years of age has been asleep here for the last twelve days. Her complexion is fresh and rosy, her breathing quite normal, and her features unaltered. “No organ seems attacked; all the vital functions are performed as in the waking state. She is fed with milk, broth and wine, which is given her in a spoon. Her mouth even sometimes opens of itself at the contact of the spoon, and she swallows without the slightest difficulty. At other times the gullet remains inert. “The whole body is insensible. The forehead alone presents, under the action of touch or of pricks, some reflex phenomena. However, by a peculiarity, which is extremely interesting, she seems, by the intense horror she shows for ether, to retain a certain amount of consciousness and sensibility. If a drop of ether is put into her mouth her face contracts and assumes an expression of disgust. At the same moment her arms and legs are violently agitated, with the kind of impatient motion that a child displays when made to swallow some hated dose of medicine. “In the intellectual relations the brain is not absolutely obscure, for on her mother’s coming to see her the subject’s face became highly colored, and tears appeared on the tips of her eyelashes, without, however, in any other way disturbing her lethargy. “Nothing has yet been able to rouse her from this torpor, which will, no doubt, naturally disappear at a given moment. She will then return to conscious life as she quitted it. It is probable that she will not retain any recollection of her present condition, that all notion of time will fail her, and that she will fancy it is only the day following her usual nightly slumber, a slumber which, in this case, has been transformed into a lethargic sleep, without any rigidity of limbs or convulsions. “Physically, the sleeper is of a middle size, slender, strong and pretty, without distinctive characteristic. Mentally, she is lively, industrious, sometimes whimsical, and subject to slight nervous attacks.”