selves or some one else, or do some other act of criminal violence.

Perhaps the most striking form in which the melancholia of children manifests itself is by suicide. So strange and unnatural does it seem that a child of eight or nine years of age should, world-weary, put an end to its own life, that one is apt to declare the thing to be against nature and to consider it inexplicable. Such act of suicide is done sometimes under a sudden impulse from the dread of punishment or after the infliction of punishment, or it is perhaps deliberately resolved upon in a state of sadness and depression consequent upon continued ill treatment by a brutal schoolmaster or parent. Falret mentions the case of a boy of eleven years of age, whe was driven by the ill treatment of his teacher into such a state of melancholia that he determined to starve himself, and made repeated attempts at suicide by drowning. But it may be carried into effect out of a constitutional indifference or disgust of life, or from a momentary impulse of disappointment when there has been no real ill treatment, nothing more perhaps than a slight rebuke or censure: one boy, aged nine years, killed himself because he lost a bird which he was very fond of; another boy, aged twelve, hanged himself because he was no higher than twelfth in his class; and a boy, aged twelve, hanged himself because he was shut up in a room with a piece of dry bread, as a punishment for having accidentally broken his father's watch. This premature disgust of life is most often the result of some ancestral taint, by reason of which the child's nervous constitution is inherently defective, unapt to accommodate itself to its surroundings, and disposed to perverted likings and dislikes and irregular reaction. The impulse which springs up out of the deranged feeling, and is fed by it, is sometimes homicidal: an instance occurs from time to time in which a child drowns, hangs, or otherwise kills another child, with an amazing coolness and insensibility, and from no other motive than a liking to do it; and there have been a few cases recorded in which more than one murder has been done in this way by

1 "Etude sur le Suicide chez les Enfants," par Durand Fardel - Annaleɛ Médico-Psychologique, 1855. 2 Durand Fardel, op. cit.

the same child. The question of hereditary taint is in reality the important question in those cases, as it is in all cases of insanity of early life.

In the majority of instances the affective insanity of early life might justly be described as hereditary; but there are some cases in which the morbid condition of nerve element which manifests itself in extreme moral perversion is not inherited, but acquired by reason of vicious habits of self-abuse. It is not correct, therefore, to describe all cases of so-called moral insanity in children as examples of hereditary insanity, although the precocious sexual feeling which leads to self-abuse is commonly the result of an inherited taint. I prefer using the word affective to the word moral, as being a more general term and expressing more truly the fundamental condition of nerve-element, which shows itself in affections of the mode of feeling generally, not of the special mode of moral feeling only; in other words, as pointing to that deepest affection of consciousness in its primordial elements which makes it true to say that his affective life betrays the real nature of the individual.

The examples of affective insanity in early life fall naturally into two divisions: (a) the first includes all those instances in which there is a strange perversion of some fundamental instinct, or a more strange appearance of some quite morbid impulse; (b) the second division comprises all those cases of complete moral perversion which often seem to the onlooker to be wilful wickedness. The former might be described as the instinctive or impulsive variety of affective insanity; the latter as moral insanity proper.

(a) Instinctive Insanity-What are the inborn instincts of mankind? The instinct of self-conservation, which is truly the law of the existence of living matter as such, and the instinct of propagation, which provides for the continuous existence of life, and is, therefore, in some sort a secondary manifestation of the self-conservative instinct. The instinct to activity which the organs of relation, that is, the organs of the so-called animal life, evince, and to the particular sorts of activity which, being adapted thereto by their form and structure, they accomplish, may be looked upon as means which the two fundamental

instincts make use of in order to attain their ends. Now the instinct of self-conservation is displayed not only by the individual creature, whether of low or high degree, but is implicit in the life of every organic element of which it is built it is, as already seen, at the root of the passions, which are fundamentally determined by impressions according as they are pleasing or painful to self. Children are of necessity extremely selfish; for it is the instinct of their being to appropriate from without, to the end that they may grow and develop: a baby is the only king, as has been said, because everybody must accommodate himself to it, while it accommodates itself to nobody.. The necessary correlate of the instinct of appropriation whereby what is pleasing to self is assimilated, is a destructive or repulsive instinct or impulse whereby what is not grateful is rejected, got rid of, or destroyed. The infant rejects the mother's breast when from some cause, internal or external, the milk is distasteful to it; by crying and struggling it strives to get rid of a bodily impression which may happen to be paining it, as the Gregarina shoots away from a stimulus, as the snail retracts its protruded horns when they are suddenly touched, as a person of tender sensibility shrinks from a painful spectacle; and when it is a little older, it rejects, destroys, or attempts to destroy what is not pleasing to it.

To talk about the purity and innocence of a child's mind is a part of that poetical idealism and willing hypocrisy by which men ignore realities and delight to walk in vain shows; in so far as purity exists it testifies to the absence of mind; the impulses which actually move the child are the selfish impulses of passion. It were as warrantable to get enthusiastic about the purity and innocence of a dog's mind. "A boy," says Plato, "is the most vicious of all wild beasts"; or, as some one else has put it, a boy is better unborn than untaught." By nature sinful and vicious, man acquires a knowledge of good through evil: not how evil entered into him first, but how good first came out of him, is the true scientific question: his passions are refined and developed in a thousand channels through wider considerations of interest and foresight; the history of mental development begins with the lowest passions, which flow as an under-current in every

life, and frequently come to the surface in a very turbulent way in many lives. Evil is good in the making as vice is virtue in the making.1

In the insanity of the young child we meet with passion in all its naked deformity and in all its exaggerated exhibition. The instincts, appetites, or passions, call them as we may, manifest themselves in unblushing, extreme, and perverted action; the veil of any control which discipline may have fashioned is rent; it is like the animal, and reveals its animal nature with as little shainefacedness as the monkey indulges its passions in the face of all the world. Inasmuch as there is present only the instinct to gratify itself, the concomitant of which is the effort to reject or destroy what is not agreeable, its disease, if it become insane, will be exhibited in a perverse and unceasing appropriation of whatever attracts its notice, and in destructive attacks upon whatever it can destroy. Refuse it what it grasps at, and it will scream, bite, and kick with a frantic energy: give it the object which it is striving for, and it will smash it if it can: it is a destructive little machine which, being out of order, lays hold of what is suitable and what is unsuitable, and subjects both alike to its desperate action. Haslam reports a case of this kind in a girl, aged three and a quarter years, who had become mad at two and a half years of age, after inoculation for small-pox. Her mother's brother was, however, an idiot, though her parents were sane and undiseased. This creature struggled to get hold of everything which she saw, and cried, bit, and kicked if she was disappointed. Her appetite was voracious, and she would devour any sort of food without discrimination; she would rake out the fire with her fingers, and seemed to forget that she had been

1 "I cannot praise," continues Milton, after saying that we know good by evil, "a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust or heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. . . . That virtue therefore which is a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that Vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental, adventitious whiteness.".

burnt; she passed her evacuations anywhere. She could not be taught anything, and never improved.1

The most striking exhibition of the destructive impulse which sometimes reaches an extreme degree in the madness of childhood is afforded by a homicidal tendency. "A girl, aged five years, conceived a violent dislike to her stepmother, who had always treated her kindly, and to her little brother, both of whom she repeatedly attempted to kill."2 Here was a sort of conscious design apparent in the act; but it is obvious that the further back in mental development we go, the less of conscious design will there be in the morbid impulse. Moreover, in the case of homicidal impulse in a young child, the consciousness of the end or aim of the act must at best be very vague and imperfect: it is driven by an impulse of which it can give no account to a destructive act, the real nature of which it does not appreciate; a natural instinct being exaggerated and perverted by disorder of the nerve-centre. It matters not much, so far as its nature is concerned, what is the particular form of the destructive impulse -whether it be homicidal or suicidal, or to set fire to the house, or to kill a cat or a canary, or to smash crockery or other perishable ware; the impulse which dominates it is as unreasoning and apparently uncontrollable as the convulsion of its limb is in chorea. Many cases are on record of older children who have displayed an incorrigible propensity to acts of pure cruelty and destruction, practised on such creatures as were not too powerful to be their victims.

Thus much concerning those phenomena of insanity in children which spring from the gross perversion of the self-conservative impulse. Let me now say a few words concerning the perversion of the instinct of propagation. It is necessary to guard against a possible objection that this instinct is not felt until puberty. There are certainly frequent manifestations of its existence. throughout early life, both in animals and in children, before there is a consciousness of the aim or design of the blind impulse. Whosoever avers otherwise must have paid very little attention to the gambols of young animals, and must be strangely

1 Observations on Madness.

2 Esquirol, Traité des Maladies Mentales.