were produced, but for the imitative movements to which they give rise.

Of the third class of Delusions, or those traceable to visceral disease, or painful and wearisome bodily sensations, I have already given more than one illustration; as also of analogous Delusions, due to local anesthesias, more or less extensive, and more or less complete.

A

With the Delusions which express, in an exaggerated and distorted form, the workings of some excited emotion or passion, no one who has any experience among the insane can fail to be familiar, and there are none more remarkable for extravagance and inconsistency. patient of my own, who claimed to be the Deity, and the Saviour, King of England, and Heir Apparent, to have made the human body, and to know everything, was but a common specimen of a very common class, remarkable, among other things, for identifying themselves with the persons and acts that have at any time strongly attracted their attention, or fired their imagination. Pride, vanity, ambition, seem to exhaust themselves in creating imaginary personages, fanciful literary performances, masterpieces of art, prodigies of strength, without the slightest regard to consistency or probability. In what sense they believe these extraordinary assertions it is hard to say. But they certainly appear very much in earnest in making them.

The tendency which these patients have to identify themselves with persons or acts that have strongly attracted their attention, is shared with the subjects of the next class of Delusions, which express, in a form

DELUSIONS OF PERSECUTION.

M'NAUGHTEN.

55

equally distorted and exaggerated, the painful sense of disappointment and injury. Griesinger mentions the case. of a man who became insane because he was forced to be a butcher, when he wished to be a priest; but we are not told of the form which his insanity assumed. The case of M'Naughten is much more complete. We know that the refusal of his father to take him into partnership originated in his mind a sense of hardship and injury; and this feeling, ever present to his mind, led him to identify himself with every body of men whom the press accused of tyranny and oppression. The Roman Catholics, the Police, and the Tories, being successively denounced as guilty of such acts, were converted in their turn into personal enemies. Unhappily, the Tories made the most lasting impression on his mind; and the murder of Mr. Drummond, by mistake for Sir Robert Peel, the then head of the Tory party, the promoter of Catholic emancipation, and the originator of an efficient police, was the bloody climax of his brooding discontent.

Into the sixth and last group of Delusions, or those which I have ventured to attribute to disordered cerebral circulation or diseased brain-tissue, I would throw all those cases in which it is not possible to trace the antecedent working of excited emotions or passions, mental shocks or disappointments, local pains and discomforts, or local anesthesias. In this class I should place, with some confidence, the gentleman who thought himself Secretary to the Moon, the woman, known to Trallian, who continually held up her middle finger, with a supposition that she supported the whole world by it, and

was in fear lest, if she bent her finger, the universe should fall into confusion; also the case of the man who feared to void his urine, lest, by so doing, he should drown the town. A man who thinks himself a lantern,or the Crystal Palace, a dog, or a wolf, ought, I think, to find a place in this group. At any rate, I cannot doubt that there is a large class of delusions for which it is not possible to assign any other cause than a direct action of the brain itself-delusions as independent of data or premisses, of imagination or reason, as a certain class of Illusions have been shown to be.

I have now arrived at the first resting-place in the progressive or cumulative survey which I proposed to make of the factors or constituents of the Unsound Mind. I began by showing that there was at least one considerable group of Illusions which could not possibly be traced to any action of the Imagination or Fancy; and I now believe myself justified in affirming that there is, in like manner, a very large group of Delusions, in the origination of which neither Imagination nor Reason, however fantastic the one, or perverted the other, bears any part. I believe that there are Illusions of the Senses and Delusions of the Mind which are to the full as involuntary, and as certainly due to the direct action of the brain itself as the outward manifestations of emotion, the grotesque movements of Chorea, or the aimless convulsions of Epilepsy. The application of these inferences to the question of Criminal Responsibility will become obvious as we proceed with our inquiry.

SECTION III-DREAMS.

I NOW invite your attention to that instructive combination of Illusions and Delusions which has, by universal consent, been looked upon as the analogue of Insanity-Dreaming. In the condition of sleep, nature presents us with one of those happy opportunities for study which we so often desire but so rarely obtain, and which, by so large an outlay of thoughtful and ingenious contrivance, we prepare for ourselves in the investigation of Truth by the method of experiment. If no such state as that of sleep existed naturally, we should earnestly desire to bring it about, that we might know how the mind would work when no longer disturbed by the intrusive images of sense, by the thoughts which such images provoke, or by the voluntary acts to which they give rise. In sleep, this work of elimination is done to our hands; and there remain, as the only disturbers of the mind, the sensations of the body itself, and as altogether exceptional occurrences, though most instructive ones, such sounds, sights, and sensations generally, as have force enough to break through the barriers which sleep has raised.

The subject of Dreaming, considered as an analogue of Insanity, was treated, with his usual care and dis

crimination, by Abercrombie, and is also carefully considered by Griesinger. I propose to treat it briefly under two heads or divisions—namely, dreams not traceable to any bodily sensation, and dreams that spring out of bodily sensations.

1. Of the first class of dreams, or those which cannot be traced to any bodily sensation, it is probable that we should be able to discover several varieties by a close observation of what happens to ourselves or others. There would be dreams of the past suggested by a renewal of its conditions (as when a hospital patient of Dr. Duncan, talking in her sleep, makes distinct allusions to the cases of patients who had been inmates of the ward two years before); there would be other cases in which anxiety arising out of a transaction long past, and thorough preoccupation of the waking mind, gives rise to a dream, in which the particulars of the transaction, scarcely noticed at the time, and quite forgotten, are reproduced with strange minuteness and fidelity (as in the case of the banker's clerk who, after the lapse of nine months from the payment to a particular person of the sum of six pounds, dreams of the transaction which he strove in vain to recollect, and has brought before him the impatient, noisy, stammering customer whom he had been requested to serve out of his turn, and to whom he found on examination that he had paid the money), and there would be still other cases differing somewhat from this last, in which memory baffled during the day shows herself, in a sort of masquerade-dress, in the dream of the night (as happened to a young lady, a