``Upon inquiry I learned that N. M. (for so I will call the victim of this delusion) made a practice of reading and of marking booksellers’ catalogues; further investigation developed that N. M.’s great-uncle on his mother’s side had invented a flying-machine that would not fly, and that a half-brother of his was the author of a pamphlet entitled `16 to 1; or the Poor Man’s Vade-Mecum.’

`` `Madam,’ said I, `it is clear to me that your husband is afflicted with catalogitis.’

``At this the poor woman went into hysterics, bewailing that she should have lived to see the object of her affection the victim of a malady so grievous as to require a Greek name.  When she became calmer I explained to her that the malady was by no means fatal, and that it yielded readily to treatment.’’

``What, in plain terms,’’ asked Judge Methuen, ``is catalogitis?’’

``I will explain briefly,’’ answered the doctor. ``You must know first that every perfect human being is provided with two sets of bowels; he has physical bowels and intellectual bowels, the brain being the latter.  Hippocrates (since whose time the science of medicine has not advanced even the two stadia, five parasangs of Xenophon)—­Hippocrates, I say, discovered that the brain is subject to those very same diseases to which the other and inferior bowels are liable.

``Galen confirmed this discovery and he records a case (Lib. xi., p. 318) wherein there were exhibited in the intellectual bowels symptoms similar to those we find in appendicitis.  The brain is wrought into certain convolutions, just as the alimentary canal is; the fourth layer, so called, contains elongated groups of small cells or nuclei, radiating at right angles to its plane, which groups present a distinctly fanlike structure.  Catalogitis is a stoppage of this fourth layer, whereby the functions of the fanlike structure are suffered no longer to cool the brain, and whereby also continuity of thought is interrupted, just as continuity of digestion is prevented by stoppage of the vermiform appendix.

``The learned Professor Biersteintrinken,’’ continued Dr. O’Rell, ``has advanced in his scholarly work on `Raderinderkopf’ the interesting theory that catalogitis is produced by the presence in the brain of a germ which has its origin in the cheap paper used by booksellers for catalogue purposes, and this theory seems to have the approval of M. Marie-Tonsard, the most famous of authorities on inebriety, in his celebrated classic entitled `Un Trait sur Jacques-Jacques.’ ‘’

``Did you effect a cure in the case of N. M.?’’ I asked.

``With the greatest of ease,’’ answered the doctor. ``By means of hypnotism I purged his intellectuals of their hallucination, relieving them of their perception of objects which have no reality and ridding them of sensations which have no corresponding external cause.  The patient made a rapid recovery, and, although three months have elapsed since his discharge, he has had no return of the disease.’’