526 A. The following is a case of apparent pre-natal suggestion recorded by Dr. Liébeault in the Revue de l'Hypnoiisme, August 1891, p. 53.

The child in question is a girl of eleven. On her left cheek and neck she has a " port-wine mark," twelve centimetres wide and twenty centimetres long, extending from the collar-bone to above the ear. The mother, Mrs. L., in the course of gestation suddenly one day in a street at Nancy came face to face with a woman, one whole side of whose face was claret colour. Scared out of composure, Mrs. L., who was just then suffering from toothache, and wore a cotton-wool bandage on her left cheek, put her hand up to her bandage; whereupon, to her astonishment, she saw that most of the people in the street had claret-coloured spots on their faces very similar to the one which had frightened her. This hallucination occurred in the first month of pregnancy, and persisted until her child was born. No effort of hers, no argument or admonition of her husband's, could avail against this strange illusion. However, it did not occur to her that the unborn child might be marked with the very same stigmata which she constantly saw on the faces of passers-by. But upon her delivery, as the child was not shown to her immediately, she became anxious, wondered whether it might not have a claret-coloured mark on the face, and expressed her fears spontaneously.

Liébeault supposes that Mrs. L. caused this mark to appear upon her unborn infant by unconscious suggestion. He found that Mrs. L. was very suggestible, and fell in less than one minute into a state of light somnambulism.

526 B. The following case was recorded by Mr. Francis Galton, in Nature (vol. liv., p. 76, May 28th, 1896), under the title, "A Curious Idiosyncrasy".

A strongly-marked idiosyncrasy has lately come to my notice, which should be recorded. A lady of my acquaintance was walking with a relative, Colonel M., when the wife of a tenant addressed her, and described how the hand of her own child had been pinched in a door. Overhearing her story, Colonel M. became quite unwell, so much so as to lead to particular inquiry, which resulted in showing that allusions to any accidents of that kind affected him at once in a very perceptible way. Finally, at the request of the lady, he wrote an account of his peculiarity, which she forwarded to me. Thereupon I corresponded with Colonel M., who slightly revised what he had written, and sanctioned its publication. It is as follows: -

" From my earliest remembrance, and still up to now, any sight of an injured nail in any person, even if a total stranger, or any injury, however slight, to one of my own nails, causes me to break into a deadly cold perspiration, with feeling of sick faintness. But still further; if I chance to hear any one else narrating in casual conversation any injury of this particular sort to themselves or others, it brings on me exactly the same feeling I have described above. So much is this the case, that many years ago, when I was in the prime of life, at a large dinner-party, when one of the guests near me persistently chanced to go on talking minutely of some such little accidental injury that had befallen him, I turned very faint, tried all I knew to shake it off, but could not, and presently slid right under the table, quite unconscious for the moment. This is the more singular because on no other point am I in the least squeamish. In old days I have seen soldiers flogged before breakfast without its affecting me, though some of the rank and file would be very much upset, and in cases of death, illness, or wounds I have never experienced, as an onlooker, the sensations I have alluded to above".

I may mention that the mother of Colonel M. had pinched her own fingernail badly shortly before his birth, and, as is not uncommon in coincidences of that kind, she believed her accident to have been the cause of her son's peculiarity. He writes to me: -

"As a boy I was conscious of this repugnance of mine, but was ashamed of it, and never used to mention it to any one. When I became a young man I one day mentioned it privately to my mother, who it appeared had already noticed it in me as a child. She then told me the incident about her own finger, and she and I being both utterly unscientific persons, assumed then and there that my squeamish feelings about injuries to finger-tips must be connected with her little accident".

In reply to further questions, I learn that the injury to the mother, however painful at the time, was not so severe as to leave a permanent mark. Also, that no analogous peculiarity is known to exist among the near relations of Colonel M., of whom he specifies his father, brother, three sisters, nephews and nieces. He has no children....