The sensation in the brain of the cataleptic, as of those recovering from drowning, resembles the pricking of needles, the circulation soon becoming accelerated. Hunger is usually intense when the patient awakes. The usual duration of catalepsy is from twenty to forty hours. The return of volition is commonly marked by perspiration; this premonitory sign is often followed by a piercing shriek, as in the case of night-mare, and, indeed, in a _slight_ degree, of an infant’s cry as soon as it is born. It has appeared to me that the cataleptic is marked by _extremes_ of feeling and disposition. The sensibility either being too dull for the feeling of joy, or so intensely excited by pleasure, as to approach the confine of delirium. One of my patients, in particular, who was an eighty-hour sleeper, endured a metamorphosis from religious enthusiasm to theatrical mania. Her Bible was discarded for romances and play-books, and even the most licentious volumes. CAST. I have read, (I suppose in some moth-eaten tomes enshrined I know not where,) of a scholar of Lubeck, who slept seven years; in Diogenes Laertius, of Epimenides, who slept fifty-one years in a cave; in Ricaut, of the seven devoted sleepers of Ephesus (the same, I presume, as the seven illustrious sleepers of Mahomet’s tale in the Koran); and of the _Leucomorians_, who fall asleep with the swallows early in November, and wake at the end of April. One moment more among the legends of romance. In the “Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels” it is written, that in a dark cavern of the Baltic, there were discovered five men in Roman habits, so deeply sleeping, that all efforts to awaken them were unavailing. Ogier the Dane is _now_ sleeping in the dungeon of Cronenburg Castle—(so recordeth the “_Danske Folk Saga_.”) Prince Arthur, too, was lying, when a chronicle was writ, in a trance at Avelon; and the Britons, with implicit belief, were watching for his awaking. Years have passed since these mysterious legends were penned, and I dare not say that the spells are broken yet. EV. If they _then_ slept, sweet Castaly, they are surely sleeping _now_. Tales lose nothing by telling, and nature is often thus magnified into a miracle. You may however _believe_ this, that a _periodical_ catalepsy with intervals may last even for years. The “Memoirs of the Academy of Berlin” record the case of a woman, who sunk into catalepsy twice a day for many years; during which period she was married, and became the almost unconscious mother of children. Nay, there is a story of Mynheer Vander Gucht, of Bremen, who, with very brief intermissions, slept and dreamt for thirty years; so that, on the return of travellers by sea or land, the primal question was, if _Mr. Vander Gucht was up_! IDA. Catalepsy, I believe, has been often _feigned_; and, although it is astonishing with what apathy pain may be endured, the imposture, I presume, may be usually discovered by the proposition of some horrible remedy.