gerous in such paroxysms. None of them knew exactly what they were fighting for; they were possessed by one of the various forms of mania — that which impelled the French Jansenists of the latter half of the 18th century to torture themselves with a strange delight in pain of the acutest liinil. The men who threw them- selves on the bayonets of the soldiers in a paroxysm of passion were a few moments afterwards utterly pros- trate and begging for mercy. They were no more cow- ards in the last state than they were heroes in the first — they were simply madmen." In recurring to the " Reign of Terror" of the first French IJevo'.ution, Lewis Cass has this profound reflection : " In surveying the French na- tional character of the present day" (this was written in 1840), "it is difficult to recognise those traits of cruelty which were so shockingly developed during the Revolu- tion. Amonomania must have prevailed, hurrying the nation into acts inconsistent with its general feeling, and marking that time of political effervescence as an ex- traordinary period in human history." The general term monomania, implies that the individual is deranged only on one suliject, or in reference to one object, or in one particular train of thought or faculty of thinking, and that his intellect, judgment, and emotions are otherwise sound, at least when not exercised on the subject of his derangement. This, however, is not strictly true. In almost all cases of so-called monomania there are other morbid indications besides the salient one — morbid dis- likes or suspicions, morbid vanity or irritability. Mono- mania seems to arise in the failure of the faculties round a given centre of thought, in a paralysis of power along a given line of mental direction, iniaccompanied by any parallel paralysis of interest, so that the patient busies himself involuntarily on a subject on which he has lost the power of bringing his faculties properly to bear. It is the attempt of weakened faculties to work upon an overstrained nervous string, so that all mental power disappears just where the wish to apply it is greatest. Now these morbid centres of partial imbecility are, cceteris jniribus, more likely to spring up in minds below the average in general power than in those above them, though the centre of the disease itself will often be on the noblest or most sensitive part of the mind. These peculiarities are nearly always distinctly marked in monomania, particularly in that form of it which is called kleptomania. It is usually exhibited by persons who have no motive to steal, and is frequently satisfied by purloining articles of no value. A baronet of large fortune stole, while on the Continent, pieces of old iron and of broken crockery, and in such quantities that tons of these collections were presented to the custom-house officers. In the second volume of the Medical Critic the case of a female is detailed who could not resist the im- pulse of appropriating everything within her reach. In searching this woman on one occasion there were found 15 bags upon her person, in which there were 1182 arti- cles, mostly worthless, viz., 104 bits of paper, 82 sewing- needles, 18' old gloves, 12 moulds for wax leaves, 19 but- tons, GO feathers, 8 parcels of dried fish, 135 bits of rib- bons, 9 bottles, CI lozenges, and a variety of other arti- cles, the refuse of the place, to which she had at various times taken a fancy. Another case reported by high medical authority is that of a rich but eccentric gentle- man living in an old manor-house in Lincohishire, Eng- land. He Avas a good business man, and managed his estate with care and prudence, auditing his steward's yearly accounts with the skill of an expert. His neigh- bors were all kindly disposed towards him, and he was charitably disposed tOAvards the poor. Even the ser- vants who saw him every day, altliough they confessed that he was "certainly very peculiar at times," never once dreamed of impugning his intellect. He was in- sane in one direction only, and one might have passed a lifetime with him without discovering it. He would be seized by a sudden determination to travel, and on such occasions he would travel in state, with a retinue of servants. After a fortnight's or perhaps a month's ab-
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KLEPTOMANIA