“But the most interesting part of Dr. Hodgson’s paper is his consideration of the alleged feats of levitation and the famous rope-climbing exploit, both of which are probably too well known to my readers to need describing here. The nature of the former of these phenomena is explained by its title; the second is the famous feat in which a rope is thrown into the air by the performer, where it stays—suspended by some unknown power—and gradually stiffens, allowing a small boy, the fakir’s assistant, to climb up it, and finally disappear in the clouds. Soon, the legs and arms of the boy are seen to fall to the ground, then the head, and finally the trunk falls to earth, all before the astonished and horrified gaze of the onlookers! These pieces gradually join themselves together, and re-form the boy’s body, whole as it was at first, and the boy goes on his way rejoicing! “Of the levitation I shall not speak now, beyond stating that it is recorded in several of the books mentioned, as previously stated. The value of the testimony will be variously estimated by individuals, partly according to their preconceived ideas of the limits of the possible, and partly according to their familiarity with the evidence that has been collected in various works on the subject. As I have considered this question of levitation elsewhere I shall dismiss it for the time being, and turn to the feat that most particularly interests us in relation to this question of hallucination and its possibilities. “It need hardly be pointed out, I believe, that if this feat were ever witnessed by Europeans at all (_i.e._, if the whole thing is not a myth), and certain individuals imagined they actually witnessed it, the effect was the result of an hallucination, and not the result of seeing what actually took place. It need scarcely be said that the nature of the trick, if trick it is (the suspension of the rope by some unknown power, the ascent of the boy into the clouds, the tumbling down to earth of the separate members, and, finally the joining together of these into a live form again), would forbid any such performance taking place in reality—except on the stage, _e.g._, when appropriate apparatus can be arranged to perform this feat—an illusion of this sort being mentioned in _Mahatma_, Vol. III., No. 5, November, 1899. If such a performance were even witnessed, therefore, it must have been the result of some sort of hallucination, possibly hypnotic, which the onlooker was experiencing at the time. The question, therefore, narrows itself down to this: was the onlooker hallucinated?