dispassionate and incredulous may perceive with shame how easily he turns back for a moment to a belief in spirits, when emotions and perplexity concur in him. I know of a physician who had once lost a patient by Basedow’s disease and could not rid himself of the slight suspicion that he had perhaps contributed by unwise medication to the unfortunate outcome. One day several years later there stepped into his office a girl, in whom, in spite of all reluctance, he was obliged to recognize the dead woman. His only thought was that it was true that the dead could return, and his fear did not give way to shame until the visitor introduced herself as the sister of the woman who had died of that disease. Basedow’s disease lends to those afflicted with it a great similarity of features, which has often been noticed, and in this case the typical resemblance was far more exaggerated than the family resemblance. The physician, moreover, to whom this happened was I, and therefore I am not inclined to quarrel with Norbert Hanold over the clinical possibility of his short delusion about Gradiva, who had returned to life. That in serious cases of chronic delusion (paranoia) the most extreme absurdities, ingeniously devised and well supported, are active is, finally, well known to every psychiatrist. After his first meeting with Gradiva, Norbert Hanold had drunk his wine in first one and then another of the hotels of Pompeii known to him, while the other guests were having their regular meals. “Of course, in no way had the absurd supposition entered his mind” that he was doing this to find out what hotel Gradiva lived and ate in, but it is hard to say what other significance his action could have. On the day after his second meeting in Meleager’s house, he has all sorts of remarkable and apparently disconnected experiences; he finds a narrow cleft in the wall of the portico where Gradiva had disappeared, meets a foolish lizard-catcher, who addresses him as an acquaintance, discovers a secluded hotel, the “Albergo del Sole,” whose owner talks him into buying a metal brooch encrusted with green patina, which had been found with the remains of a Pompeiian girl, and finally notices in his own hotel a newly-arrived young couple, whom he diagnoses to be brother and sister, and congenial. All these impressions are then woven into a “remarkably nonsensical” dream as follows: “Somewhere in the sun Gradiva sat making a trap out of a blade of grass in order to catch a lizard, and she said, ‘Please stay quite still—my colleague is right; the method is really good and she has used it with the greatest success.’” To this dream he offers resistance even while sleeping, with the critique that it is indeed the most utter madness, and he casts about to free himself from it. He succeeds in doing this, too, with the aid of an invisible bird who utters a short, merry call, and carries the lizard away in his beak.