Nearly every book on hypnotism gives various rules for detecting simulation of the hypnotic state. One of the commonest tests is that of anaesthesia. A pin or pen-knife is stuck into a subject to see if he is insensible to pain; but as we shall see in a latter chapter, this insensibility also may be simulated, for by long training some persons learn to control their facial expressions perfectly. We have already seen that the pulse and respiration tests are not sufficient. Hypnotic persons often flush slightly in the face; but it is true that there are persons who can flush on any part of the body at will. Mr. Ernest Hart had an article in the Century Magazine on “The Eternal Gullible,” in which he gives the confessions of a professional hypnotic subject. This person, whom he calls L., he brought to his house, where some experiments were tried in the presence of a number of doctors, whose names are quoted. The quotation of a paragraph or two from Mr. Hart’s article will be of interest. Says he: “The ‘catalepsy business’ had more artistic merit. So rigid did L. make his muscles that he could be lifted in one piece like an Egyptian mummy. He lay with his head on the back of one chair, and his heels on another, and allowed a fairly heavy man to sit on his stomach; it seemed to me, however, that he was here within a ‘straw’ or two of the limit of his endurance. The ‘blister trick,’ spoken of by Truth as having deceived some medical men, was done by rapidly biting and sucking the skin of the wrist. L. did manage with some difficulty to raise a slight swelling, but the marks of the teeth were plainly visible.” (Possibly L. had made his skin so tough by repeated biting that he could no longer raise the blister!) “One point in L.’s exhibition which was undoubtedly genuine was his remarkable and stoical endurance of pain. He stood before us smiling and open-eyed while he ran long needles into the fleshy part of his arms and legs without flinching, and he allowed one of the gentlemen present to pinch his skin in different parts with strong crenated pincers in a manner which bruised it, and which to most people would have caused intense pain. L. allowed no sign of suffering or discomfort to appear; he did not set his teeth or wince; his pulse was not quickened, and the pupil of his eye did not dilate as physiologists tell us it does when pain passes a certain limit. It may be said that this merely shows that in L. the limit of endurance was beyond the normal standard; or, in other words, that his sensitiveness was less than that of the average man. At any rate his performance in this respect was so remarkable that some of the gentlemen present were fain to explain it by supposed ‘post-hypnotic suggestion,’ the theory apparently being that L. and his comrades hypnotized one another, and thus made themselves insensible to pain.