persons can accurately foretell the day of an approaching attack and
how long it will last. The same thing occurs almost invariably in
the case of spontaneous, and generally in that of artificial,
somnambulism; certainly the Pythia, as is well known, used to
announce the date of her next ecstatic state. In like manner the
curative instinct displays itself in somnambulists, and they have
been known to select remedies that have been no less remarkable for
the success attending their employment than for the completeness with
which they have run counter to received professional opinion. The
indication of medicinal remedies is the only use which respectable
electro-biologists will make of the half-sleeping, half-waking
condition of those whom they are influencing. "People in perfectly
sound health have been known, before childbirth or at the
commencement of an illness, to predict accurately their own
approaching death. The accomplishment of their predictions can
hardly be explained as the result of mere chance, for if this were
all, the prophecy should fail at least as often as not, whereas the
reverse is actually the case. Many of these persons neither desire
death nor fear it, so that the result cannot be ascribed to
imagination." So writes the celebrated physiologist, Burdach, from
whose chapter on presentiment in his work "Bhicke in's Leben" a great
part of my most striking examples is taken. This presentiment of
deaths, which is the exception among men, is quite common with
animals, even though they do not know nor understand what death is.
When they become aware that their end is approaching, they steal away
to outlying and solitary places. This is why in cities we so rarely
see the dead body or skeleton of a cat. We can only suppose that the
unconscious clairvoyance, which is of essentially the same kind
whether in man or beast, calls forth presentiments of different
degrees of definiteness, so that the cat is driven to withdraw