He had no memory whatever of his name or of his second marriage and the place of his birth.

He remembered, however, the date of his birth, and of his first wife's death, and his trade.

But between January 17th, 1887, and March 14th he was not himself but another, and that other one Albert J.Brown, who ceased to exist consciously on March 14th, but who promptly returned four years afterwards, when Ansel Bourne was hypnotised, and showed that he remembered perfectly all that happened to him between these two dates.

The confusion of his two memories in his earlier life is puzzling, but it in no way impairs the value of this illustration of the existence of two independent memories--two selfs, so to speak, within a single skin.
The phenomenon is not uncommon, especially with epileptic patients.
Every mad-doctor knows cases in which there are what may be described as alternating consciousnesses with alternating memories.

But the experiments of the French hypnotists carry us much further.