"In a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a young woman, who could neither read nor write, was seized with a fever, and was said by the priests to be possessed of a devil, because she was heard talking Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Whole sheets of her ravings were written out and found to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves but having slight connexion with each other. Of her Hebrew sayings, only a few could be traced to the Bible and most seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. Many eminent physiologists and psychologists visited the town and cross-examined the case on the spot. All trick was out of the question; the woman was a simple creature: there was no doubt as to the fever. It was long before any explanation, save that of demoniacal possession, could be obtained. At last the mystery was unveiled by a physician, who determined to trace back the girl's history, and who, after much trouble, discovered that at the age of nine she had been charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she lived till his death. On further inquiry, it appeared to have been the old man's custom for years to walk up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice out of his books. The books were ransacked, and among them were found several Greek and Latin Fathers, together with a collection of Rabbinical writings. In these works so many of the passages taken down at the young woman's bedside were identical that there could be no reasonable doubt as to their source." James, who considered that phenomenal memories were accounted for by the exceptional persistence or permanence of the "paths" of thought, a purely physiological property of the brain-tissue of the individual, quotes a case within his own experience which, if we accept Hudson's theory, affords a typical illustration of the facility possessed by some men of drawing upon the knowledge of their own subjective minds.