“On him, that’s an improvement,” said Damon Dance-for-Me,

We have yet to mention the peculiar illusions of the phenomena of movement which occur just before falling asleep. Panum tells how he once inhaled ether, and then observed, lying in bed, how the pictures on the wall went further and further back, came forward and withdrew, again and again. Similar things happen to sleepy people. Thus, the preacher in church seems progressively to withdraw and return. The criminalistic significance of such illusions may be in the observation of movements by people who are falling asleep, e. g., of thieves who seemed to be approaching the witnesses' beds, though standing still.

That sleeping people may be influenced in definite ways is indubitable. Cases are mentioned in which sleepers could be made to believe any story; they would dream of it, and later on believe it. There is in this connection the story of the officer who acquired the love of a young girl in this fashion; the girl had shown definite distaste for him at first, but after he had told her during her sleep,

[1] P. Jessen: Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Begrndung der Psychologie. Berlin 1885.

[2] Cf. H. Gross's Archiv. XIII 161, XIV 189.

in her mother's presence, of his love and loyalty, she began in the course of time to return it. It is a fact that certain of our burglars believe similar things, and carry them out in most cases with the assistance of red light, to which they assign hypnotic power. They claim that with a lantern with red glass they are able to do anything in the room containing a sleeping individual, and can intensify his sleep by letting the red light fall on his face, and speaking to him softly. Curiously enough this is corroborated by a custom of our mountain lads. They cover a lantern with a red cloth and go with it to the window of a sleeping girl. It is asserted that when the red light falls on the latter's face and it is suggested to her softly to go along, she does so. Then a pointed stone is placed in the girl's way, she steps on it, it wakes her up, and the crude practical joke is finished. It would be interesting, at least, to get some scientific information concerning these cited effects of red light upon sleeping people.

O. Mnnigshoff and F. Piesbergen[1] have thrown some light on the profoundness of sleep--why, e. g., a person hears a thing today and not at another time; why one is awakened and another not; why one is apparently deaf to very loud noise, etc. These authorities found that the profundity of sleep culminates in the third quarter of the second hour. Sleep intensifies and grows deeper until the second quarter of the second hour. In the second and third quarters of that hour, the intensification is rapid and significant, and then it decreases just as rapidly, until the second quarter of the third hour. At that point sleep becomes less and less profound until morning, in the second half of the fifth hour. At this moment the intensity of sleep begins again to increase, but in contrast with the first increase is very light and takes a long time. Sleep, then, reaches its culmination in one hour out of five and a half; from that culmination- point it decreases until it reaches the general level of sleep.

Apart from the pathological conditions of intoxication, especially the great intolerance toward alcohol,[2] which are the proper subjects for the physician, there is a large group of the stigmata of intoxication which are so various that they require a more accurate study than usual of their causes and effects. As a rule, people are

[1] Zeitschrift f. Biologie, Neue Folge, Band I.