The forms of insanity which we passed under review, with the exception of the epileptic insanity, were all more or less connected with the organs and function of generation, and the next five forms are also of the same class. The first three, as you will see by a reference to the table, are connected with child-bearing—the Insanity of Pregnancy, of Parturition (or puerperal insanity), and of Lactation.

Having made ourselves acquainted, in a measure, with the more rudimentary perversions to which mental operations in prisoners are liable, we shall be the better able to enter upon a consideration of those more advanced perversions which establish themselves at the expense of the healthy exercise of a reasonable intelligence, and which induce behaviour so eccentric or obstructive as to necessitate medical interference. These latter I propose to deal with under the general term of delusions; not being always careful to discriminate between a “delusion proper” and a hallucination; for, after all, what is a hallucination in its outward manifestion but a delusion credited (upon grounds not always well established) with some relationship to the organs of sense.

Several cases of so-called Syphilitic Insanity have now been recorded, including some good examples of the affection, in the last number of the “Journal of Mental Science,” by Drs. Newington and Batty Tuke. I now add two more which have lately been under my care in Guy's Hospital. They present no peculiar features of interest, having a general resemblance to those already reported; but I publish them in furtherance of obtaining a collection of cases in order that we may gain such a correct knowledge of their nature as numbers alone can afford.

In striking contrast to the frequent introduction of madness into their plays by the tragedians, is the rarity of any allusion to it by the great comic writer of Athens. This is not due, as might be supposed, to any feeling that good taste would be violated by putting so terrible an affliction as insanity on the stage in a ludicrous light. The marvellous genius of Aristophanes was bound by none of our modern canons of delicacy; while no flight of fancy was too high for him, no depth of coarseness was too base; and he, who in his satire was no respecter of gods or men, was not likely to refrain from putting the antics of a madman before his audience, if he thought it would serve his purpose.

In the “Journal of Mental Science” for October, 1870, Dr. Howden, the Superintendent of the Montrose Asylum, published an analysis of the lesions observed by him in the brains of 235 persons who died insane, and expressed a hope that some uniform method of arranging the morbid appearances found in the insane after death would be adopted by Psychologists, so as to render of scientific value the postmortem records of the different asylums, and be a ready means of reference to any one working at special lesions. Dr. Tuke, in an appendix to the annual report of the Fife and Kinross Asylum for 1871, followed the plan proposed by Dr. Howden, and arranged in a tabular form the lesions found by him in the brains of 75 insane persons. With the sanction of Dr. Marshall, I collected and arranged, in a similar way, the lesions observed in the brains of 390 women who died in Colney Hatch. From these sources Table I. has been formed. It shows the lesions and their frequency in the brains of 700 people who died insane, and although its value is greatly lessened by the absence of the history, symptoms, and form of insanity under which the patients laboured, still it gives the changes from health to disease, which are, to a certain extent, peculiar to insanity.

The life of the philosopher has for some minds a higher charm than that of a poet—the life of a practical worker a greater attraction than that of a student or dreamer—the career of an earnest living reality more than that of a mystic, or even of a professor of the ideal. The career of the natural phenomenon, whose name heads this article, embraced to a great extent all of these conditions. Born in an age when the dawn of a new creation was already beginning to climb over the hills by which men's minds were environed—at a time when the rude disentanglements, by processes new and strange, were shortly to make themselves felt among the believers in an old faith—when the first throes of the great moral volcano of modern times seemed to indicate but feebly its future terrible force—the mind of young Rousseau buds forth like some fragile blossom of spring pushing its sensitive shoots through the frozen snow on the mountains around his native town.

This asylum is for the male and female lunatics of the Department of Ille et Vilaine, who, arranged according to their sex and class, on the day of my visit, were, in numbers, as follows:—