The real events and possibilities of the future are reflected in vague and dreamlike emotions and longings, that have much bliss in them, but not a little, too, of seriousness and difficulty. The adolescent feels instinctively that he has now entered a new country, the face of which he does not know, but yet that is full of possibility of good and happiness for him. He has a craving, too, for action of some sort-not merely the football action of the boy, but something of more serious import. Longfellow's youth that vaguely cried "Excelsior" was evidently at this stage of life. His reasoning faculty first gets some backbone at this period. His emotional nature acquires for the first time a leaning towards the other sex that quite swallows up the former emotions. It is not yet at all under his control, fixed or definite in its aims. His sense of the seriousness and responsibility of life may be said to awake then for the first time in a real sense. The first sense of right and wrong and of duty becomes then more active instead of passive. He has yearnings after the good, and is capable of an intense hatred and scorn of evil which he could not have experienced before.

But it is in the female sex that the period of adolescence has attracted most attention, especially among those psychological students and delineators of character, the novelists of the day. As physicians, we know that it is only then that hysteria, migraine, and the graver functional and reflex neuroses arise. As men of the world, we know that the love-making, the flirting, the engagements to marry, and the broken hearts of the adolescents are not really very serious affairs. The cataclasms of life do not happen then. We know that no artist ever painted, or no sculptor ever modelled, a Venus who had not passed adolescence. A very fine and most interesting study of adolescence in the female sex is, in my opinion, to be found in the Gwendolen Harleth of George Eliot's novel of Daniel Deronda. This authoress was by far the most acute and subtle psychologist of her time, and certainly the character I have mentioned is most worthy of study by all physicians who look on mind as being in their field of study or sphere of action.

From the time when, at the gaming-table, Gwendolen caug Deronda's eye, and was totally swayed in feeling and action by the presence of a person of the other sex whom she had n seen before; playing, not because she liked it or wished to wi but because he was looking on, all through the story till b marriage, there is a perfect picture of female adolescence. Tr subjective egoism tending towards objective dualism, the ress lute action from instinct, and the setting at defiance of cala tion and reason, the want of any definite desire to marry, wh all her conduct tended to promote proposals, the selfishness regards her relations, even her mother, and the organic cravin to be admired, are all true to nature. Witness her state of mind when Grandcourt first appeared :

"Hence Gwendolen had been all ear to Lord Brackenshaw's mode a accounting for Grandcourt's non-appearance; and when he did arrive, si consciousness was more awake to the fact than hers, although she steady avoided looking towards any point where he was likely to be. Then should be no slightest shifting of angles to betray that it was of any sequence to her whether the much-talked-of Mr Mallinger Grandcont presented himself or not. And all the while the certainty that he wa there made a distinct thread in her consciousness."

Again :

"Gwendolen knew certain differences in the characters with which was concerned as birds know climate and weather."

The sentimentality of this period of life is well illustrated when Gwendolen says—

"I never saw a married woman who had her own way.' 'What should you like to do?' said Alex, quite guilelessly, and in real anxiety. [He was an adolescent just entering on the period.] 'Oh, I don't know! Go to the North Pole, or ride steeplechases, or go to be a queen in the ball, like Lady Hester Stanhope,' said Gwendolen, flightly. 'You don't mean you would never be married.' 'No, I didn't say that. Only, when I married, I should not do as other women do.'

The inchoate religious sentiment, as a psychological faculty contending with the egoism, is thus brought out :

"What she unwillingly recognised, and would have been glad for others to be unaware of, was that liability of hers to fits of spiritual dread. She was ashamed and frightened as at what might happen again,

in remembering her tremor on suddenly finding herself alone. . . Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in the midst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself. With human ears and eyes about her she had always hitherto recovered her confidence, and felt the possibility of winning empire."

The selfishness and craving for notice is thus hit off:-
:-

"I like to differ from everybody, I think it is stupid to agree.' "Her thoughts never dwelt on marriage as the fulfilment of her ambition. . . . Her observation of matrimony had induced her to think it rather a dreary state, in which a woman could not do as she liked, had more children than were desirable, was consequently dull, and became irrevocably immersed in humdrum. Of course marriage was social promotion. She could not look forward to a single life. . . . She meant to do what was pleasant to herself in a striking manner; or rather, whatever she could do so as to strike others with admiration, and get in that way a more ardent sense of living, seemed pleasant to her fancy."

But extracts merely spoil the whole picture, which is one that is in perfect accord with the facts of nature, drawn by a consummate artist. It is one of the most perfect psychological studies with which I am acquainted.

It seems like passing from the poetry of science to Dryasdust's details, to descend from George Eliot's word-pictures to the details of physiological fact and speculation that underlie all this charming maiden's mental constitution. I think most medical men of extensive observation would agree with me, that the incompleteness of those mental tokens of merely developing womanhood and manhood during the period of adolescence do indicate that the conditions under which the reproduction of the species takes place should be deferred till adolescence has passed. The love-making of adolescence is not the serious matter it should be, as Gwendolen's history well shows; and therefore, the full physiological and psychological conditions for dualism not being there, it should not be encouraged. All serious love-making, engagements to marry, too free intercourse with the other sex, too much dancing, too much going into society, merely tend to force on the full development, like young plants in a hothouse, with the result that the flowers

and fruits have a tinge of artificialness, do not last, do not stand the same tear and wear. A young man who marries before his beard is fully grown breaks a law of nature and sins against posterity. A girl who gets engaged while in Gwendolen's state of mind is not likely to derive all the happiness in marriage of which she is capable. It follows, therefore,-and most members of our profession would, I think, agree with me,-that sexual intercourse should not be indulged in till after adolescence.

The period of adolescence is very liable to those psychological cataclasms in weak brains, attacks of mania, that have a special relationship to the function of reproduction. Especially it seems to me that the periodicity and remission of the nisus generativus in both sexes, and the menstrual periodicity which accompanies it in females, is reflected in a periodicity and tendency to remission in the insanity that occurs during adolescence.

Passing now from the physiological and psychological characteristics of adolescence to the forms of mental disease that prevail then, the following was a very severe case of the insanity of adolescence terminating in recovery:-K. Q., æt 23, a student, who worked hard, who had a neurotic heredity, whose life had been sedentary, and whose bodily health and nutrition had run down. It was feared, too, he had been given to the habit of masturbation. He had been working extra hard to pass an examination, when suddenly, without any other exciting cause, he became morbidly exalted, lost his power of sleep, got restless, talkative, violent, and unmanageable at home. Within four days he had to be sent to the asylum. He then laboured under acute, almost delirious, mania. He was exalted, giving incoherent descriptions of metaphysical speculations and mental problems. There was a great deal of the sexual element running through his incoherence and his speculations His temperature was 100.1°, his pulse 84, weak; his weight 11 st. 12 lbs. He was kept outside nearly all day in charge of two good attendants, though most violent; he was compelled to take four custards a day, each containing four eggs and a pint

and a half of milk, in addition to any ordinary food he could be got to take. He was treated with warm baths at night, with cold to his head, and large doses of bromide and iodide of potassium combined while the temperature was high. He slept little, and in spite of the enormous quantity of nourishment taken he fell off in flesh and strength. Contrary to my usual custom in adolescent cases, I added a considerable quantity of port wine to his diet, as he looked at times so exhausted. In the first six weeks of his stay in the asylum he lost 2 st. in weight. All kinds of sedatives were tried temporarily in vain. I thought he was going to die of exhaustion. He had a slight beginning of a hæmatoma, which was blistered, and so stopped. The excitement was paroxysmal and recurrent in its intensity, though he was never free from it. After about two months the intensity of the maniacal condition began to abate, and he passed into what is to me a most anxious stage in these cases. His expression of face became enfeebled looking, his habits dirty, he masturbated badly, and his whole mental state suggested dementia rather than either mania or recovery. One cannot pay sufficient attention to the treatment of such symptoms in that stage. The nourishment was made a little more stimulating by strong soups, in addition to the milk and eggs. He got fresh vegetables, cod-liver oil, with the hypophosphites, and strychnine and iron. He was narrowly watched, and well nursed, and much moral treatment adopted to rouse and interest him. It was in truth a toss up between recovery and dementia, between mental life and mental death. Fortunately the recuperative power of his brain and constitution prevailed, he slowly picked up flesh, and his beard and whiskers began to sprout,-I have much faith in adolescent recoveries when the beard has grown coincidently with recovery,-and his weight increased. fast and steadily, until in six months from the commencement of his illness he was quite well in mind, and strong and stout in body, weighing 13 st. His was one of only about six patients that I have seen where recovery took place after a hæmatoma had formed or even been threatened in any degree.