“Upon recovering his senses he set about his usual labours as if he had been asleep but the ordinary time. He remembers nothing that has taken place during his seven years’ trance.” The following case appeared in the _Middlesbrough Daily Gazette_, February 9, 1896, and in a number of English papers:-- “The young Dutch maiden, Maria Cvetskens, who now lies asleep at Stevensworth, has beaten the record in the annals of somnolence. At the beginning of last month she had been asleep for nearly three hundred days. The doctors, who visit her in great numbers, are agreed that there is no deception in the case. Her parents are of excellent repute, and it has never occurred to them to make any financial profit out of the abnormal state of their daughter. As to the cause of the prolonged sleep, the doctors differ.” CHAPTER II. CATALEPSY. CATALEPSY differs in some of its characteristics from trance, but the one is often mistaken for the other. It is not so much a disease as a symptom of certain nervous disorders, and to which women and children are more particularly liable. Catalepsy can be produced artificially by hypnotisation. Like trance, it has often been mistaken for death, and its subjects buried alive. Dr. Franz Hartmann differentiates the two disorders as follows:--“There seems hardly any limit to the time during which a person may remain in a trance; but catalepsy is due to some obstruction in the organic mechanism of the body, on account of its exhausted nervous power. In the last case the activity of life begins again as soon as the impediment is removed, or the nervous energy has recuperated its strength.” Dr. Gowers, in Quain’s “Dictionary of Medicine,” ed. 1894, vol. i., pp. 284-5, describes catalepsy as belonging to both sexes, at all ages from six to sixty. It is a nervous affection, commonly associated with distinct evidence of hysteria, but said sometimes to occur as an early symptom of epilepsy. It is attended commonly with loss of consciousness. The limbs remain in the position they occupied at the onset, as if petrified. The whole or part of the muscles pass into a state of rigidity. In profound conditions sensibility is lost to touch, pain, and electricity; and no reflex movements can be induced even by touching the conjunctiva, a state of mental trance being associated. [NATURE OF CATALEPSY.]