not found to be quite so much alike as a common name would imply; indeed, they may rightly be divided into three principal classes-(a) the first class, consisting of those who, not being really criminally disposed, have fallen in consequence of the extraordinary pressure of exceptionally adverse circumstances; (b) the second class, of those who, having some degree of criminal disposition, might still have been saved from crime had they had the advantages of a fair education and of propitious conditions of life, instead of the disadvantages of an evil education and of criminal surroundings; (c) the third class, of born criminals, whose instincts urge them blindly into criminal activity, whatever their circumstances of life, and whom neither kindness, nor instruction, nor punishment will reform, they returning naturally to crime when their sentences are expired, like the dog to its vomit or the sow to its wallowing in the mire. It illustrates the strength of the instinctive repugnance to antisocial beings that while compassion is oftentimes felt for a criminal of the first class, and apology made for his crime, not the least pity is felt nor the least allowance made for the fearful tyranny of his bad organization under which the criminal of the third class groans and succumbs. Clearly society might justly commiserate the criminal at the same time that it deliberately punished him by sequestration for its own certain protection and for his possible reformation.

In this relation it is interesting to note how much a desire of concealment and a feeling of disgrace still attach to the occurrence of insanity in a family, despite all that may be said with regard to its nature as a defect or a disease calling for compassion. The feeling has at bottom a certain justification in the truth that insanity is a mark of family degeneracy, the initiation of a morbid variety of the human kind, a proclamation of failure in adaptation to the complex social and physical conditions of civilised life. The sufferer is an outcast from the social system, being unable to conform to the laws which govern social organization and function. There always has been, and for a long time to come there will no doubt still be, a feeling of distrust. of and repugnance to the anti-social unit who has fallen from his high rational estate as a being who can feel, think, and act

with his kind, and whose thoughts and deeds are incompatible with the social well-being; he will lie under a social ban, and the family to which he belongs will feel the reflected stigma.

The foregoing considerations make it plain that if all sorts and conditions of insanity were swept clean from the face of the earth at one stroke, so that hereditary predisposition could not work as a factor in its production, no long time could elapse before a new start was given to one or other of its forms of degeneracy. It is a mere question of time when a deviation. from the laws of social well-being shall reach such a pitch that the individual who is the outcome is unfit to take his place and perform his functions as a social element, and must be treated as a morbid variety; degeneracy of the moral being must ensue in consequence of a persistent disregard of these laws as surely as disease or death of body will ensue from a persistent disregard of the laws of physical health; and he who is going the way of degeneracy from the ideal type of wholesome manhood plainly cannot help, but will hinder that evolution of the social organism which, as it is the effect, we may take to be in the purpose, of nature's development. All those who are going this downward way, along whatever special path, we might class together under the head of anti-social elements; there would be many varieties of them, ranging from the first beginnings of degeneracy to the extremest forms thereof.

It would not perhaps be too absolute a statement to makeThat one of two things must happen to an individual in this world if he is to live successfully in it: either he must be yielding and sagacious enough to conform to circumstances, or he must be strong enough, a person of that extraordinary genius, to make circumstances conform to him. If he cannot do either, or cannot manage by good sense or good fortune to make a successful compromise between them, he will either go mad, or commit suicide, or become criminal, or drift a helpless charge upon the charity of others.

Having thus set forth the meaning of insanity as an aberrant phenomenon in the social organization, and so hinted at the conduct of life which is best suited to prevent it, I go on now 1 to treat more particularly of that definite predisposition to it

which is produced by similar or allied disease in one or other of the immediate ancestors.

Morbid Heredity.-This is a subject respecting which it is not possible to get exact and trustworthy information. So strong is the feeling of disgrace attaching to the occurrence of insanity in a family, and so eager the desire to hide it, that persons who are not usually given to saying what is not true. will disclaim or deny ostentatiously the existence of any hereditary taint, when it is known certainly to exist or is betrayed plainly by the features, manner, and thoughts of those who are denying it. Not even its prevalence in royal families has sufficed to make madness a fashionable disease. The main value of the many doubtful statistics which have been collected by authors in order to decide how large a part hereditary taint plays in the production of insanity is to prove that with the increase of opportunities of obtaining exact information the greater is the proportion of cases in which its influence is detected; the more careful and exact the researches the fuller is the stream of hereditary tendency which they disclose. Esquirol noted it in 150 out of 264 cases of his private patients; Burrows clearly ascertained that it existed in six-sevenths of the whole of his patients; on the other hand, there have been some authors who have brought the proportion down as low as onetenth. Some years ago I made a tolerably precise examination of the family histories of fifty insane persons taken without any selection; there was a strongly marked predisposition in fourteen cases-that is in 1 in 3:57, and in ten more cases there was sufficient evidence of family degeneration to warrant more than a suspicion of inherited fault of organization. In about half the cases then was there reason to suspect morbid predisposition. I have recently inquired into the histories of fifty more cases, all ladies, the opportunities being such as could only

1 Elaborate statistical tables which have been gathered from public asylum reports, in order to exhibit the proportions of instances in which hereditary predisposition has existed, have never been of any value, except so far as they served to occupy or amuse those who were at the pains to compile them; only where the inquirer is brought into the most intimate relations with the friends of the patients can he make an approach to accuracy, and even then it will be an approach only.

occur in private medical practice, and with these results: that in twenty cases there was the distinct history of hereditary predisposition; in thirteen cases there was such evidence of it in the features of the malady as to beget the strongest suspicion of it; in seventeen cases there was no evidence whatever of it. In the second fifty cases my opportunities of getting information were more favourable in consequence of more frequent personal intercourse with the friends, and it sometimes happened that the information sought for was obtained quite accidentally after heredity had been denied. What is the exact proportion of cases in which some degree or kind of hereditary predisposition exists must needs be an unprofitable discussion in view of the difficulty and complexity of the inquiry; suffice it to say broadly that the most careful researches agree to fix it as certainly not lower than one-fourth, probably as high as one-half, possibly as high even as three-fourths.

Two weighty considerations have to be taken into account in relation to this question: first, that the native infirmity or taint may be small or great, showing itself in different degrees of intensity, so as on the one hand to take effect only when conspiring with more or less powerful exciting causes, or on the other hand to give rise to insanity even amidst the most favourable external circumstances; and, secondly, that not mental derangement only in the parents, but other forms of nervous. disease in them, such as epilepsy, paroxysmal neuralgia, strong hysteria, dipsomania, spasmodic asthma, hypochondriasis, and that outcome of a sensitive and feeble nervous system, suicide, may predispose to mental derangement in the offspring, as, conversely, insanity in the parent may predispose to other forms of nervous disease in the offspring. We properly distinguish in our nomenclature the different nervous diseases which are met with in practice according to the broad outlines of their symptoms, but it frequently happens that they blend, combine, or replace one another in a way that confounds our distinctions, giving rise to hybrid varieties intermediate between those which are regarded as typical.

This mingling and transformation of neuroses, which is observed sometimes in the individual, is more plainly manifest

when the history of the course of nervous disease is traced through generations; if instead of limiting attention to the individual we go on to scan and track the organic evolution and decay of a family-processes which are sometimes going on simultaneously in different members of it, one displaying the outcome of its morbid, another of its progressive tendencies -it is seen how close are the fundamental relations of certain nervous diseases and how artificial the distinctions between them sometimes appear. Epilepsy in the parent comes out perhaps as some form of insanity in the offspring, or insanity in the parent as epilepsy in the child. Estimating roughly the probable breeding results of a number of epileptic parents, one might say that they would be very likely to lose many children at an early age; that the chances were great that some children would be epileptic; and that there was almost as great a risk that some would become insane. Chorea or other convulsions in the child may be the consequence of great nervous excitability, natural or accidentally produced, in the mother. In families where there is a strong predisposition to insanity, one member shall sometimes suffer from one form of nervous disease, and another from another form: one perhaps has epilepsy, another is afflicted with a severe neuralgia or with hysteria, a third may commit suicide, a fourth becomes maniacal or melancholic, and it might even happen sometimes that a fifth evinced remarkable artistic talent. Neuralgic headaches or megrims, various spasmodic movements or tics, asthma and allied spasmodic troubles of breathing will oftentimes be discovered to own a neurotic inheritance or to found one. The neurotic diathesis is fundamental; its outcomes are various, and determined we know not how; but they may, I think, be either predominantly sensory, or motor, or trophic in character. Were we only as exact as we could wish to be in our researches we ought then, in studying hereditary action and its issues, to mark the different roads. It is plain there may be (a) Heredity of the same form-that is, when a person suffers from the same kind of mental derangement as a parent had which he seldom does except in the cases of suicide and dipsomania; (b) Heredity of allied form, as when he suffers from