in Marshal d’Albret’s time; yet he used to faint at the sight of one.  It is not uncommon to meet with persons who faint at the sight of blood.  One of the most inveterately pugnacious of Dr. Butts’s college-mates confessed that he had this infirmity.  Stranger and far more awkward than this is the case mentioned in an ancient collection, where the subject of the antipathy fainted at the sight of any object of a red color.  There are sounds, also, which have strange effects on some individuals.  Among the obnoxious noises are the crumpling of silk stuffs, the sound of sweeping, the croaking of frogs.  The effects in different cases have been spasms, a sense of strangling, profuse sweating,—­all showing a profound disturbance of the nervous system.

All these effects were produced by impressions on the organs of sense, seemingly by direct agency on certain nerve centres.  But there is another series of cases in which the imagination plays a larger part in the phenomena.  Two notable examples are afforded in the lives of two very distinguished personages.

Peter the Great was frightened, when an infant, by falling from a bridge into the water.  Long afterward, when he had reached manhood, this hardy and resolute man was so affected by the sound of wheels rattling over a bridge that he had to discipline himself by listening to the sound, in spite of his dread of it, in order to overcome his antipathy.  The story told by Abbe Boileau of Pascal is very similar to that related of Peter.  As he was driving in his coach and four over the bridge at Neuilly, his horses took fright and ran away, and the leaders broke from their harness and sprang into the river, leaving the wheel-horses and the carriage on the bridge.  Ever after this fright it is said that Pascal had the terrifying sense that he was just on the edge of an abyss, ready to fall over.

What strange early impression was it which led a certain lady always to shriek aloud if she ventured to enter a church, as it is recorded?  The old and simple way of accounting for it would be the scriptural one, that it was an unclean spirit who dwelt in her, and who, when she entered the holy place and brought her spiritual tenant into the presence of the sacred symbols, “cried with a loud voice, and came out of” her.  A very singular case, the doctor himself had recorded, and which the reader may accept as authentic, is the following:  At the head of the doctor’s front stairs stood, and still stands, a tall clock, of early date and stately presence.  A middle-aged visitor, noticing it as he entered the front door, remarked that he should feel a great unwillingness to pass that clock.  He could not go near one of those tall timepieces without a profound agitation, which he dreaded to undergo.  This very singular idiosyncrasy he attributed to a fright when he was an infant in the arms of his nurse.

She was standing near one of those tall clocks, when the cord which supported one of its heavy leaden weights broke, and the weight came crashing down to the bottom of the case.  Some effect must have been produced upon the pulpy nerve centres from which they never recovered.  Why should not this happen, when we know that a sudden mental shock may be the cause of insanity?  The doctor remembered the verse of “The Ancient Mariner:”