The illusions of the senses are striking. If the lunatic hears a noise, it is of voices addressing him-of friends flying to his rescue, or of enemies rushing to his destruction. M. Esquirol attended a lady whom the slightest sound threw into a paroxysm of terror. She trembled at the murmuring of the wind, and the noise which she herself made in bed alarmed her to such a degree, that she would rise and scream for assistance. She was got to sleep by having a light burning in her chamber and an attendant to watch over her.

The sight, more particularly, breeds these idle fancies. Nothing more likely, for sight is the great sense.

A lady, labouring under hysterical mania, was constantly at the window of her apartment. Whenever she saw an insulated cloud she cried to it, "Garnerin, Garnerin, come for me." She mistook the cloud for one of Garnerin's balloons.

An officer of cavalry believed that the clouds he saw, were an army headed by Napoleon for a descent upon Britain.

The insane often collect stones and bits of broken glass, which they think are diamonds, objects of vertù, or of natural history. They preserve them with the greatest care, and wonder, perhaps, at the ignorance of those who do not perceive their inestimable value.

The light and shade on the walls of the apartment may lead to singular

illusions.

M-, labouring under melancholia, was in the habit of constantly striking at the furniture, &c. of the room in which he walked. The faster he walked, the harder he hit. At last M. Esquirol ascertained that the alternations of light and shade, occasioned by his transit through the room, created the illusion that there were rats in it. The faster he walked, the more, of course, the rats were multiplied.

M. Esquirol attended a young lady possessed of a lively imagination, who had devoted much attention to literature and to art. She had become maniacal, and passed her nights without sleep, in raptures at the beauty of the paintings which she saw upon the bed and window-curtains. On taking away the light, the illusion vanished.

M. Esquirol relates two other cases for the purpose of proving that the mere act of vision has much to do with similar illusions.

Reil relates the instance of a lady who had paroxysms of agitation, and even of fury. Her attendant, one day, in the endeavour to calm her, put her hands before her eyes. The patient immediately grew tranquil, and said that she saw nothing. Her physician repeated the experiment with the same result.

M. Esquirol attended a young soldier, allied to the family of Bonaparte. He had gone through many hardships, become maniacal, and was placed under M. Esquirol's care. He saw in all the persons around him members of the Imperial family, and was highly incensed at perceiving the domestics engaged in any servile occupation. He prostrated himself at the feet of one whom he took to be the Emperor, and claimed his pity and protection. M. Esquirol determined to try the effect of bandaging his eyes. The patient instantly grew calm, and could even discourse rationally on the subject of his illusions. M. Esquirol repeated this experiment on several occasions with the same result. On one, the bandage was kept on for twelve hours, during which there was no illusion. As soon as he was allowed to see, the latter re-appeared.

The sense of smell, gives rise to its lying brood. The insane often refuse their food, on account of the disagreeable odour in it; and they not unfrequently complain of noxious gases in the air.

M. Esquirol has seen lunatics when in a state of great disquiet or of agitation, soothed by the diffusion of agreeable odours in their rooms.

In almost all instances the commencement, and, in some, the course of mental diseases exhibit disturbance of the organs of digestion. These patients may find a bad taste in all the food presented to them. They suspect poison, and reject sustenance with horror or with rage. The suspicions which torment them make them conceive distrust and aversion of their friends or relatives, and greatly distress, of course, the latter. The symptom ceases after a few days, either under the influence of abstinence, or from the effect of a few evacuations. It need not occasion alarm, for in cause, in character, and gravity, it differs from the obstinate refusal to eat on the part of monomaniacs-a refusal originating in some dominant idea, such as an expiation, or a precept of religion or of honour, or a resolution to die.

The parched state of the mucous membrane of the tongue and mouth, give some lunatics the idea that earth is mingled with their food. In dementia, on the other hand, taste being destroyed, the patients eat with avidity the most filthy and disgusting substances.

When inflammation, or other lesion, has affected the meninges or the structure of the brain, the limbs of the insane sometimes tremble, while the extremities of the fingers lose their natural sensibility. Such patients are clumsy, seize things awkwardly, and do not hold them well. They break or let them fall, and judge erroneously of the form, extent, solidity, and weight of bodies.

A lady much debilitated by an accouchement and by sanguineous evacuations, resorted to for the purpose of combating an attack of mania, laboured under obstinate constipation. M. Esquirol prescribed lavements, which the lady insisted on giving to herself. Scarcely had she taken the syringe in her hand, when she threw it down with horror. This happened several times. The lady afterwards assured our author, that the syringe seemed to her so heavy, that she thought it filled with mercury, and was convinced that she was to be turned into a barometer.

M. Esquirol winds up this Essay by the following conclusions:

1. Illusions are provoked by sensations originating within or without. 2. Illusions are the result of the action of the sentient extremities of the nerves, and of the re-action of the sensorium.

3. Illusions must not be confounded with hallucinations, in which the sensorium alone is at fault.

4. Illusions beguile the judgment on the nature and the cause of impressions actually made, and may drive the insane to acts fraught with danger to himself or to others.

5. Education, habit, profession, sex, modify the character of the illusion. 6. Illusions take their tone from the dominant passions and ideas of the insane.

7. Reason disperses the illusions which may occur in the man of sane mind, but it cannot dissipate those of the lunatic.

Such is the memoir of M. Esquirol on the subject of illusions. This and the preceding one, on hallucinations, are worth the attentive perusal of our readers.

Periscope;

OR,

CIRCUMSPECTIVE REVIEW.

"Ore trahit quodcunque potest, atque addit acervo."

Notices of some New Works.

THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS UPON PAUPERISM, POOR LAWS, EMIGRATION, MEDICAL RELIEF, AND THE PREVENTION OF CRIME. By William Fergusson, M.D. F.R.S.E., Inspector General of Army Hospitals. 8vo. London, 1839.

THE substance of these Thoughts first appeared in the shape of letters in the Windsor Express. The object of the author is evidently to improve the social condition of the lower classes in this country, and to lend his hand to extricate them from that degraded sink of pauperism into which they had fallen. Dr. Fergusson's opinion of the old poor law and its consequences may be gathered from the following passage :

The compulsory rate answered temporarily the same purpose in England, but its operation here, as everywhere else, infallibly led to the same ruin; and our beautiful land was but very lately in the speedy course for becoming a vast pauper warren, where the demoralized wretch, in order to share in the plunder, was obliged, in the first instance, to divest himself of every vestige of propertyto convert his comely cottage into a hovel-and to assume the habits and habiliments of beggary; for the practice of any of the decencies of life would immediately have subjected him to robbery, and constituted him a giver instead of a partaker in the spoil. The rural population was everywhere plunging into this stye; beggary insatiate and insatiable had become almost the sole vocation of the man, and the trade of bastardy, so lucrative and so strenuously advocated by good, but mistaken men-the resource of the woman. Some of the most fertile districts of our country had actually lapsed into this shocking state; rent had ceased to be paid, or the land in consequence to be cultivated with effect; they would have multiplied like the beasts of the field, and like these beasts they would have come in the process of subdivision, and in the scramble for a share, as we see in the present peasantry of Ireland, to have destroyed one another. And this is the state of things preached up and advocated by the charity-mongers of the present day,-while there exists a most corrupt and venal press which, with persevering malignity, strives to stir up the people in insurrection against this charter of their worldly rescue-to make it a question of political party-to array against it not only all the feelings of the uneducated poor, but to use it as an instrument of party hostility against their rivals, in the struggle for the attainment of political power."

It is impossible for any unprejudiced man, possessed of sound reasoning powers, to peruse the report of the poor law committee, and not to perceive that the old poor law was working the degradation of the lower classes of this country, and the injury, if not the destruction, of all. A bonus was offered on the spread of pauperism and of all the vices that follow in its train. When the man who did not work was as well off as the man who did, and the female who

had lost her virtue and could count her bastards was in a better situation than the virtuous maid, or the wife or widow with her family, it might easily be predicted that laziness would prevail and that prostitution would flourish. Yet this is the state of things which some would affect to consider the beau ideal of moral and political wisdom, and the attempt to remedy it is denounced as the extreme of tyrannous cruelty. As Dr. Fergusson observes

"Habits of virtue go hand-in-hand with industry, and of these economy and providence are, in a worldly sense, the first. A code of laws, therefore, striking at the very root of the last, made their practice all but impossible. We established, indeed Savings' Banks to receive the deposits of the careful; but the law in substance said-Why should you be so foolish as to make them ?-take your gains to the pot-house-waste them in any sensuality you please—the parish is your resource and inheritance-is bound to take your children off your hands, to relieve you from your obligations as parents, and to parents-to guard you in sickness, and support you in old age-you have only to shew, that whatever may have been your occasional gains, you have ever been improvident and reckless, and have resolutely abstained from laying by a single farthing; resort then to her, for she acknowledges no disqualification but a decent garb and habits of virtue! Here let me pause to express my admiration of the intrinsic worth of the English national character, which not even such a system of law could irremediably vitiate or destroy."

We all know the outcry against the Union Bastilles. But this may be said with safety-that if we give the man who will not work the same comforts and the same freedom as are earned by the sweat of the brow, the majority will be found to decline labour and to live on alms. Out-door relief to the able-bodied must generate idleness and all the evils in its train. Men must look upon pauperism as an evil, or they will not struggle to avoid it.

But it is by no means equally clear that out-door relief might not be extended with advantage to the sick and to the aged. The "out-and-out" economists scout, we know, such an idea. According to them the labourer ought to have laid by sufficient money during the vigour of life, to support him in sickness, or when too old for work. But when we reflect on the low rate of wages, particularly to agricultural labourers, and the occasional deficiency of work even for those who are most willing to engage in it, we must pause ere we subscribe to such a doctrine. It seems to us impossible that the savings of such persons can ever amount to sufficient to keep them in sickness and senectitude.

Much of the antipathy to the New Poor Law has arisen from the assumption of offensively arbitrary power by the Commissioners. The change from the old system to the new was perhaps too sudden and violent. A law which neces sarily wears the appearance of harshness, was made in practice harsher. The feelings of Englishmen revolted against the semblance of dictation and oppression, and the final success of the experiment has been endangered.

Dr. Fergusson warmly recommends emigration, in connection with the improved system of poor laws at home. The friends of the poor are in excessive dudgeon if they (the poor, not their friends) are not permitted to starve or to pauperise in England, and in England only. What is universally done in a small way, they will not permit to be done in a large. If a street has too many bakers the obvious remedy is for some to remove, and to find a neighbourhood in which dough is in demand. Every body acts upon this hint. But if a country has too many inhabitants, those who are too poor to transport themselves elsewhere, are not to be transported at the cost of the rest. This is exile, white slavery, and we know not what. Nature has limited the size of our island, but she has not limited the birth of human beings on it. According to these friends of humanity we are to go on procreating and pauperising to the end of the chapter, and to make no attempt to find other provender for the superfluous mouths.

We pass over much of Dr. Fergusson's pamphlet, occupied as it is with general political questions, and proceed to what particularly affects ourselves—the present system of administering medical relief to the poor. A villainous system enough. We cannot help thinking that the hard measure doled out to medical men, has partly been due to their mixing themselves up with the general opposition to the New Poor Law. It is well known that some of the medical journals have displayed a very strong hostility to this measure. The majority of the Legislature, and indeed of all intelligent men in the empire, are so strongly convinced of the necessity for such a law, and so opposed to the clamour against it, that any body of men mixed up in that clamour are certain to be viewed with distrust and aversion. The claims of the medical profession were not likely to be heard with favour, if mingled with a medical anti-poor-law shout.

Dr. Fergusson observes :

"Centralization-the vis unita fortior-I acknowledge to be an excellent principle in all government, but it is not applicable to medical attendance upon the poor; when the Poor Law Commissioners therefore united a number of parishes together and then advertised for the lowest tenders, calling up the inexperienced tyro from the schools, in want of a place, to underbid the established practitioner who had long been in charge, they handed over the sick poor to serve the purpose of the former's selfish speculation, or held him up in terrorem over the latter, with the view of imposing conditions upon him which he never could execute in fairness either to the unfortunate paupers or himself."

Certainly the system of “tender," is any thing but a tender system for the poor. Would these fat and insolent Commissioners provide medical relief for their own bloated carcasses on tender? Would they advertise for the lowest doctor-the cheapest physic? Catch a weasel asleep! But they thought, no doubt, that the worst would do for the poor, and that the parish doctor was a sneaking animal, and would be bullied with impunity. The Commissioners have already found that the medical profession will not tamely submit to be injured and insulted in the same breath.

The great remedy is union, association, and a common principle and mode of action on the part of the profession itself. If it is united, neither commissioners nor ministers, neither the public nor the executive, can trample on it. If broken, jealous, disunited, all will prey on it. We recommend then the forma tion of associations, their extension, their co-operation. Such associations will present a bold front to assaults from without, and (what is of consequence) will repress treason within. The profession has suffered because its own members have been tempted to betray its interests, in the eager search of their own. Dr. Fergusson proceeds :

:

"The system of tender, in any shape, for personal services is a vile one. If acted upon extensively it would destroy any profession, and has been most unwarrantably applied in this case to the general practitioners of England, comprehending a body so numerous that they may be reckoned by thousands; and ever since the passing of the Apothecaries' Act, in the year 1815, have been the best qualified and most valuable that any country ever possessed; search Europe through, there is nothing to be found at all comparable to them. There is not a family in the land that has not been beholden to them for the lives of its members, and to make war upon such men for the sake of a show of economy -for, as I shall presently prove, it can be nothing more, if it be even thatmay almost be characterised as national ingratitude. Whoever declaims in this manner ought to be prepared to point out a remedy, and I shall here propose a very simple, and I believe, a perfectly practicable one. Let every pauper on the union list, sick and well, be rated at five shillings per annum, for medical relief; that is, for a small fraction more than a penny a-week, and let this be the pay of the best qualified, and if possible, the nearest practitioner; for the nearest, for obvious reasons, must always be the best. There can be little doubt that he