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Page 45
No tidings of the missing volume came to me, and I had almost
forgotten the incident when one evening (it was fully two years
after my discussion with my cronies) I came upon, in one of the
drawers of my oak chest, a Sotheran catalogue of May, 1871. By
the merest chance I opened it, and as luck would have it, I
opened it at the very page upon which appeared this item:
``Hillier (G.) `Narrative of the Attempted Escapes of Charles the
First from Carisbrooke Castle'; cr. 8vo, 1852, cloth, 3/6.''
Against this item appeared a cross in my chirography, and I saw
at a glance that this was my long-lost Hillier! I had meant to
buy it, and had marked it for purchase; but with the
determination and that pencilled cross the transaction had ended.
Yet, having resolved to buy it had served me almost as
effectively as though I had actually bought it; I thought--aye, I
could have sworn-- I HAD bought it, simply because I MEANT to buy
it.
``The experience is not unique,'' said Judge Methuen, when I
narrated it to him at our next meeting. ``Speaking for myself, I
can say that it is a confirmed habit with me to mark certain
items in catalogues which I read, and then to go my way in the
pleasing conviction that they are actually mine.''
``I meet with cases of this character continually,'' said Dr.
O'Rell. ``The hallucination is one that is recognized as a
specific one by pathologists; its cure is quickest effected by
means of hypnotism. Within the last year a lady of beauty and
refinement came to me in serious distress. She confided to me
amid a copious effusion of tears that her husband was upon the
verge of insanity. Her testimony was to the effect that the
unfortunate man believed himself to be possessed of a large
library, the fact being that the number of his books was limited
to three hundred or thereabouts.
``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.' ''
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