St. Augustine called it “a transport, by which the soul is separated and, as it were, removed to a distance from the bodily senses,” and, following this definition, Ambrose Paré, the father of French surgery, terms it “a reverie with rapture of the mind, as if the soul were parted from the body.” St. Bonaventure, the contemporary and biographer of St. Francis of Assisium, says that ecstasy “is an elevation of the soul to that source of divine love which surpasses human understanding, an elevation by which it is separated from the exterior man.” St. Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Bona, and other theological writers give similar definitions; while among medical authorities, Briquet, J. Franck, Bérard, Thomas King Chambers, Guislain of Brussels, Clymer, Gratiolet, and many others describe its symptoms and discuss its pathological relations. Well-marked ecstasy and the stigmata have but seldom been united in the same individual, and still more rarely have these extraordinary manifestations been subjected to the searching tests of science. It will not, then, be amiss to present the readers of this magazine with a brief description of the most notable illustration in recent times of these marvellous phenomena, as the case has acquired a European celebrity, attracting the scrutiny of many savants, and forming the subject of an interesting memoir[49] by a professor in the Belgian University of Louvain. From his description of the facts, which he was officially appointed to investigate in their scientific bearings, we shall condense the following account. In the rich and industrial province of Hainault, in Belgium, is situated the village of Bois d’Haine, about midway between the towns of Charleroi and Mons. It is mainly composed of cottages occupied by workmen in the neighboring manufactories; and in one of the poorest of these Louise Lateau, the subject of this notice, was born January 30, 1850.