History of the case.—G. C—, No. —, æt. 41, single, a Scotchman, was admitted into the Hayward's Heath Asylum on the 31st October, 1860.

In 1856, this patient was committed for seven days to Maidstone Gaol for some breach of the peace while under the influence of drink, and he then stabbed a fellow-prisoner (who subsequently died of the wound), whom he had never seen before, and who had in no way provoked or offended him. His own account of the transaction is that, on the second or third day after his committal, he was coming out of the chaplain's room, and being left alone in the corridor, a sudden idea took possession of his mind that he was in a place where men were cut up for preserved meat for the navy, and that seeing a carpenter's chisel lying on the ground (some repairs were in progress), he took it up, and blindly attacked the first prisoner he met.