I have this circumstance from M. Best himself, who remembered it clearly. How explain it? It may be said that, knowing his mother was ill, the child often thought of her, and had an hallucination which happened to coincide with his mother's death. That is possible. But it may be thought, too, that there was some sympathetic link between the mother and child, and at that solemn moment the mother's soul may really have been in communication with her child. How? one may ask. We know nothing about it. But what we do not know, is to what we know in the proportion of the ocean to a drop of water. _Hallucinations!_ That is easily said. How many medical works have been written upon this subject! Everybody knows that of Brierre de Boismont. Among the numberless incidents which it relates, let us cite the two following: "Observation 84. When King James came to England at the time of the London plague, being at Sir Robert Cotton's house in the country with old Camden, he saw, in a dream, his oldest son, who was still a child living in London, with a bleeding cross on his forehead, as if he had been wounded by a sword. Frightened at this apparition, the king began to pray; in the morning he went to Camden's chamber and told him the events of the night; the latter reassured the monarch, telling him he had nothing to torment himself about. That very day the king received a letter from his wife announcing the death of his son, who had died from the plague. When the child appeared to his father, he had the height and proportions of a grown man. "Observation 87. Mlle. R., a person of excellent judgment, religious, but not a bigot, lived before her marriage at her uncle's house, D., the celebrated physician and a member of the Institute. She was away from her mother, who was attacked by violent illness in the country. One night this young person dreamed that she saw her, pale, disfigured, very near death, and showing deep grief at not having her children with her, one of whom, the curate of a parish in Paris, had emigrated to Spain, the other being in Paris. Soon she heard herself called by her christian name several times; in her dream she saw the persons who were with her mother, thinking she called her little granddaughter, who had the same name, go into the next room for her, when a sign from the sick woman told them it was not she, but her daughter who lived in Paris, whom she wanted to see. Her face showed the grief she felt at the daughter's absence; suddenly her features changed, the paleness of death spread over her face, and she fell back lifeless on her bed.