STEREOTYPED EXPRESSIONS.

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accustomed place, and the poor patient made aware of the fact, intimated that that was what he had been anxious about. I heard no more of the committee.

Of the important part which verbal utterances play in Insanity I need not remind you. We all know that mania, in one of its manifestations, is a raging incoherence; in another a ceaseless repetition of some form of words, as of the Lord's Prayer; in another, a curious propensity to, and strange power of, rhyming; in another, a strange medley of old words with new meanings, and new words of the patient's own invention. Then there are cases in which an attack of mania is ushered in by an unwonted flow of witty speeches; and other cases in which the patient seems governed by verbal formulæ, often taken from the Bible; and others again in which, as in one of Conolly's cases, every outbreak of incoherent speech is brought to a close by a stereotyped expression, such as "Glory, glory; glorious, glorious;" words which the speaker is angry with his hearers for not understanding.

Now all that I had occasion to say when speaking of Illusions and Delusions may, I believe, be said with truth of spoken words. There are cases in which speech reflects an excited emotion by incoherent words appropriate to the emotion, but still involuntary; other cases in which the words are not fashioned by any antecedent emotion, but are as involuntary as the convulsions of epilepsy cases, too, in which words are rightly read but wrongly interpreted, just as real sensations are changed and transformed.

So much for spoken words. But to complete the subject something ought to be said of the incoherent expressions which the insane commit to writing. These might be styled written incongruities; and as they differ from incoherent speech only in being written down with the greater attention which this mode of communication supposes, they find a fitting place in this section. Conolly, in his "Indications of Insanity," strings together three apt illustrations of these insane incongruities. One lunatic claims to be the emperor of Russia, the pope, the general of England, and Julius Cæsar; a second who never had ten pounds in his life, will boast that he gave his son a fortune of nine hundred millions of pounds, "besides some loose silver he had in his pocket, and four pennyworth of halfpence;" a third asserts that he is in Turkey, in France, in Newgate, and in the "Rule of Three," and that he perfectly recollects what happened fifty years ago, though he is only forty-five years of age.

The same writer gives us two highly characteristic letters, one written by a man who calls himself the "Great Mighty Grand Admiral," the other by one who claims to be the "Son of Jupiter."

The writer of the first letter who is described as a tall, portly, good-looking gentleman, dressed in black, with a countenance manly and expressive, and a manner grave and natural, and who, but for the way in which he had decorated himself, might have been taken for the chaplain or physician of the asylum, covers the walls of his room with his titles, and commits to the care of his visitors a letter in keeping with his lofty pretensions.

WRITTEN INCONGRUITIES.

ΙΟΣ

These were the titles he assumed :-Supreme from the Almighty, Mighty Prince, Mighty General-in-Chief, Great Mighty Grand Admiral. Mixed up with these were the names of heathen deities and modern worthies, a picture of the Trinity (insinuating that he is one of the three) and a portrait of himself. He holds a commission from God Almighty, and is a Great Prophet. In his letter, which must be answered in three days on pain of Hell, the writer gives his orders, and mixes up in the most incongruous manner, a bible and various religious books; grammars, magazines, newspapers, and almanacs; music and musical instruments; plans, maps, directories, and histories of royal and titled personages, concluding with Buonaparte and the Beast; with wines, fruit, lozenges, tobacco, snuff, oysters, money, "everything fitting to Almighty God."

The second letter is addressed to his medical attendant by a patient at Charenton. He is astonished that he is detained there on a suspicion of madness, because he declares himself the son of Jupiter. If his physician will accompany him to Olympus, he will be convinced. He cannot be a man of "ordinary birth" or he would not possess those scientific attainments which adorn his mind and heart with all the flowers of the sublimest eloquence. He could not have related with such vehement, impetuous, war-like audacity, the high transactions of Greece and Rome; he could not have restored the Iliad to its colouring as it sprang from the genius of Kanki, who lived many millions of ages before the deluge of Ogyges. "A second hour" (he had not spoken of a first) "sufficed

him to make an epopee, embracing the universal history of Greece, of Rome, and of this great and generous France: the same space of time to execute a painting of immense and prodigious dimensions. By these statements, expressed in lofty language, he thinks that he sufficiently vindicates his claim to have Jupiter as his father and the divine Juno for his tender mother. If his physician will intercede for him that he may be restored to his family and his divine parents, he will cherish a divine gratitude, eternal as the life of the gods.

SECTION VII.

CONVULSIVE MOVEMENTS.

CONVULSIONS are among the most interesting and instructive factors of the Unsound Mind. Whether they constitute a single well-defined disease, as in catalepsy and epilepsy; or are the result of some familiar local irritation, as in teething; whether they assume the rare form of rigid spasm, as in catalepsy and ecstasis, or take the more common shape of alternate contraction and relaxation; or are blended with other symptoms, as in hysteria and chorea, they are always instructive. They teach us something by the suddenness of their attack, something by the seeming inadequacy of their cause, and the simple remedies to which they often owe their cure; but still more by their frequent association with insanity. That convulsions are often present in Unsoundness of mind, and, when present, play a very important part in it, may be inferred from the fact that Griesinger, when discussing the "separate elementary disturbances which are always found grouped together in the various forms of Insanity," recognises an "Insanity of movement as one of the triad of which intellectual and emotional insanity are the remaining members. I under the phrase "insanity of movement" we comprise