The whole story of secondary personality in recent years vividly recalls commonplaces in the older medical literature that gathered around the study of hysteria, and that afford a striking confirmation of the conclusion as to the relation of the conditions ascribed to hysteria. Physicians of a generation or two ago who found their hysterical patients interesting, because of certain marvelous symptoms which they presented, were usually astonished to learn that their patients could, under suggestion, develop still further and more surprising symptoms. Each new visit, especially when other physicians were brought to see the patient, showed the existence of still further symptoms and revealed new depths of interesting disease. Indeed, the soil was found to be inexhaustible in its power to produce ever new and interesting crops of symptoms. When the real significance of hysteria as a mental condition in which patients devoted themselves to the task of furnishing new symptoms for the physician began to be realized, one of the most potent objections against this explanation was that it would have been impossible for the patients to have studied out their symptoms enough to furnish the new material for study which physicians found so interesting. The patients were supposed to be mentally incapable of fooling the physicians. When, however, a person devotes entire attention to the one subject of making phenomena in themselves appear interesting to others, some very startling results are usually produced. After having attracted the sensational attention so common with any novel observation and having been exaggerated out of all proportion to its due significance, the phenomenon is now settling down to its proper place--a rather obscure neurotic phenomenon of memory in hysteric individuals.