Girls often smile sweetly in full catalepsy, but the countenance will become anxious as waking approaches; and this must ever excite suspicion. The body indeed is, to the external world, _dead_; for although the cataleptic will often swallow food, while all the other muscles are in spasm, this may, I believe _does_, depend on mere _irritability_, by which, as I before told you, the brain is first excited, and then directs a movement without the mind’s feeling. Catalepsy is so peculiar to young females of extreme sensibility, that it may be considered an intense _hysteria_, depending on certain _sympathies_, or resulting from sudden or powerful influences on the passions. The form of catalepsy marked by _hysteria_ is least dangerous; but it is very stubborn. Probably this is the form so common in Germany. Previous to the _cataleptic acme_ girls are often maniacally violent, and will then suddenly regain their temper and their reason. They will sit and play with their fingers in a sullen mood, and the power of motion and speech and other acts of volition may be alternately impaired or lost. In some, the sleep has been preceded by fits of lethargy, by lassitude, and inaptitude to exertion, and perhaps a propensity to sleep-walking. The decided state of catalepsy has begun in an epileptic convulsion. In all, I think, I have seen combined with this disorder, irregular determination of blood; in one case, where the taste and smell were gone for four or five months, the climax was suicide by arsenic. The countenance is almost always placid in cataleptic sleep; the eyes being turned up, the pupils dilated, but the eyelids closed. If the fit be the result of _sudden_ fright, the features will remain as they were at that moment—the eyelid fixed, but the pupil usually sensible. The joints and muscles are pliable, and may be moulded to any form, but they remain in that position as rigidly fixed as the limbs of a clay figure, or the _anchylosed_ joints of the self-torturing fakir; insensible to all stimuli, beating, tickling, or pricking. I have seen patients lapse into a state of catalepsy, _in a moment_, without a struggle. I remember, during one of my visits to the asylum in Hoxton, a maniac, who often in the midst of his occupation became instantaneously _a statue_; leaning a little forward, one arm lifted up, and the _index_ finger pointed as at some interesting object; the eye staring and ghastly, and the whole expression as of one rapt in an ecstacy of thought or vision. The waking from a trance, like the recovery from the _asphyxia_ of drowning, is painful. It is attended with a struggle, and the hand is almost invariably placed firmly _over the heart_, as if its actions were a painful effort to overcome _congestion_. In some cases, indeed, a purple hue will suddenly suffuse the cataleptic body; the limbs are then extremely rigid, but become pliant when the healthy tint is restored.