an undeveloped or masked form, showing itself, not by convulsions, but by periodic attacks of mania, or by manifestations of extreme moral perversion, which are apt to be thought wilful viciousness. But they are not: no moral influence will touch them; they depend upon a morbid physical condition, which can only have a physical cure; and they get their explanation, and indeed justification, afterward, when actual epilepsy occurs.

The epileptic neurosis is certainly most closely allied to the insane neurosis; and when it exists in its masked form, affecting the mind for some time before convulsions occur, it is hardly possible to distinguish it from one form of the insane neurosis. The difficulty of doing so is made greater, inasmuch as epilepsy in the parent may engender the insane neurosis in the child, and insanity in the parent the epileptic neurosis in the child. A character which the insane neurosis has in common with the epileptic neurosis is, that it is apt to burst out in a convulsive explosion of violence; that when it develops into actual insanity it displays itself in deeds rather than in words-in an insanity of action rather than of thought. It is truly a neurosis spasmodica. Take, for example, a case which is one of a class, that of the late Alton murderer, who, taking a walk one fine afternoon, met some little girls at play, enticed one of them into a neighboring hop-garden, there murdered her and cut her body into fragments, which he scattered about, returned quietly home, openly washing his hands in the river on the way, made an entry in his diary, "Killed a little girl; it was fine and hot;" and, when forthwith taken into custody, confessed what he had done, and could give no reason for doing it. At the trial it was proved that his father had had an attack of acute mania, and that another near relative was in confinement, suffering from homicidal mania. He himself had been noted as peculiar; he had been subject to fits of depression, been prone to weep without apparent reason, and had exhibited singular caprices of conduct; and it had once been necessary

to watch him from fear that he might commit suicide. He was not insane in the legal or the ordinary sense of the term, but he certainly had the insane neurosis, and it may be presumed confidently that he would, had he lived, have become insane.

Those who have practical experience of insanity know well that there is a most distressing form of the disease; in which a desperate impulse to commit suicide or homicide overpowers and takes prisoner the reason. The terrible impulse is deplored sometimes by him who suffers from it as deeply as by any one who witnesses it; it causes him unspeakable distress; he is fully conscious of its nature, and struggles in vain against it; his reason is no further affected than in having lost power to control, or having become the slave of, the morbid and convulsive impulse. It may be that this form of derangement does sometimes occur where there is no hereditary predisposition to insanity, but there can be no doubt that in the great majority of cases of the kind there is such a neuropathic state. The impulse is truly a convulsive idea, springing from a morbid condition of nerve-element, and it is strictly comparable with an epileptic convulsion. How grossly unjust, then, the judicial criterion of responsibility which dooms an insane person of this class to death if he knew what he was doing when he committed a murder! It were as reasonable to hang a man for not stopping by an act of will a convulsion of which he was conscious. An interesting circumstance in connection with this morbid impulse is that its convulsive activity is sometimes preceded by a feeling very like the aura epileptica-a strange morbid sensation, beginning in some part of the body, and rising gradually to the brain. The patient may accordingly give warning of the impending attack in some instances, and in one case was calmed by having his thumbs loosely tied together with a ribbon when the forewarning occurred. Dr. Skae records an instructive example in one of his annual reports. The feeling began at the toes, rose gradually to the chest, producing a

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sense of faintness and constriction, and then to the head, producing a momentary loss of consciousness. This aura was accompanied by an involuntary jerking-first of the legs, and then of the arms. It was when these attacks came on that the patient felt impelled to commit some act of violence against others or himself. On one occasion he attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself into the water; more often the impulse was to attack others. He deplored his condition, of which he spoke with great intelligence, giving all the details of his past history and feelings. In other cases a feeling of vertigo, a trembling, and a vague dread of something fearful being about to happen, resembling the vertigo and momentary vague despair of one variety of the epileptic aura, precede the attack. Indeed, whenever a murder has been committed suddenly, without premeditation, without malice, without motive, openly, and in a way quite different from the way in which murders are commonly done, we ought to look carefully for evidence of previous epilepsy, and, should there have been no epileptic fits, for evidence of an aura epileptica and other symptoms allied to epilepsy.

It is worth while observing that in other forms of insanity, when we look closely into the symptoms, there are not unfrequently complaints of strange, painful, and distressing sensations in some part of the body, which appear to have a relation to the mental derangement not unlike that which the epileptic aura has to the epileptic fit. Common enough is a distressing sensation about the epigastrium: it is not a definite pain, is not comparable strictly to a burning, or weight, or to any known sensation, but is an indescribable feeling of distress to which the mental troubles are referred. It sometimes rises to a pitch of anguish, when it abolishes the power to think, destroys the feeling of identity, and causes such unspeakable suffering and despair that suicide is attempted or accomplished. In other cases the distressing and indescribable sensation is in the crown of the head or down the spine, and sometimes it arises from the pelvic organs. In

all cases the patients connect their mental trouble with it, regarding it as the cause of the painful confusion of thought, the utter inability of exertion, the distressing ideas, and the paroxysm of despair. Perhaps they exaggerate its impor-. tance; but there can be little doubt that writers on mental disorders, too exclusively occupied with the prominent mental features, have not hitherto given sufficient attention to these anomalous sensations. We have been apt to class them as hypochondriacal, and to pass them over as of no special significance; but I cannot help thinking that, properly studied, they may sometimes teach us more of the real nature of the particular form of insanity-of its probable course, termination, and its most suitable treatment-than many much more obtrusive symptoms.

In bringing this lecture to an end, I may fitly point out how entirely thus far the observation of the phenomena of defective and disordered mind proves their essential dependence on defective and disordered brain, and how closely they are related to some other disordered nervous functions. The insane neurosis which the child inherits in consequence of its parent's insanity is as surely a defect of physical nature as is the epileptic neurosis to which it is so closely allied. It is an indisputable though extreme fact that certain human beings are born with such a native deficiency of mind that all the training and education in the world will not raise them to the height of brutes; and I believe it to be not less true that, in consequence of evil ancestral influences, individuals are born with such a flaw or warp of Nature that all the care in the world will not prevent them from being vicious or criminal, or becoming insane. Education, it is true, may do much, and the circumstances of life may do much; but we cannot forget that the foundations on which the acquisitions of education must rest are not acquired, but inherited. No one can escape the tyranny of his organization; no one can elude the destiny that is innate in him, and which unconsolously and irresistibly shapes his ends, even when he be

lieves that he is determining them with consummate foresight and skill. A well-grounded and comprehensive theory of mind must recognize and embrace these facts; they meet us every moment of our lives, and cannot be ignored if we are in earnest in our attempts to construct a mental science; and it is because metaphysical mental philosophy has taken no notice whatever of them, because it is bound by the principle of its existence as a philosophy to ignore them, that, notwithstanding the labor bestowed on it, it has borne no fruits-that, as Bacon said of it, "not only what was asserted once is asserted still, but what were questions once are questions still, and, instead of being resolved by discussion, are only fixed and fed."