suicide,) as great dishonesty or misfortune in business matters, or disappointed ambition, or injured pride, there is a high probability of his soundness of mind; especially if to this there can be added evidence of forethought, deliberation, and method used for accomplishing the object aimed at.

The condition in which the suicide left his affairs, is also to be taken into consideration. Many a man has been debarred from taking his own life, simply by its not being insured, and his family being dependent on him for support. Only this past winter, here in New York, we heard of one who, on a certain occa sion, found his affairs in such a desperate condition, and had met with so many misfortunes and disappointments, that he desired no longer to live; and had his life been insured, he would, as he afterward told a friend, have committed suicide.

The mere depression of spirits or avoidance of society cannot be taken as evidence of unsound mind, for we are certainly not willing to allow this in extenuation of other acts generally regarded criminal; but the course in life of the suicide should be carefully investigated, as well as the physical peculiarities which he has inherited.

Much may also be learned from the letters and writings of the suicide, in which are often given the reasons for the deed. If these are of a similar nature to those which were known to influence his acts in daily life (supposing him to have been known as a sane man) they afford fair evidence of his sanity; for the insane give illusions, hallucinations, and other

indications of diseased mind as reasons for taking their own life.

Our object in this paper has not been to assert or justify our approval of suicide under any circumstances, but to show that it may be, and often has been committed by persons in full possession of unim paired mental faculties, and in spite of the love of life, the fear of death, and the precepts of Christianity.

ART. III.—The Legal Consequences of Insanity. By S. HENRY DICKSON, M.D., LL.D., Professor Practice of Medicine, Jefferson Medical College, Philadel phia, Pa.

LUNACY-by which term I intend to denote all the forms of intellectual imbecility, dementia, mania, and mental unsoundness included under the technical law phrase "non compos mentis "-Lunacy is a condition. deeply indeed to be deplored; not only as in itself one of the direst of human calamities, but most sadly also, on account of the series of evil results which attend upon it.

The lunatic loses his civil rights, and is debarred from the performance of his civil duties. He is deprived of the control of his own property during his life, and the disposal of it at his death; he is liable to restraints on his personal liberty; he is considered incompetent to give testimony in a court of justice, and to vote at an election; he cannot even commit a crime, although he may be doomed to undergo the

highest penalty (death excepted) affixed to the most criminal actions, to perpetual imprisonment, namely, or incarceration during the pleasure of the local authorities. To all these inflictions he is liable, with aggravations not enumerated here, under the stern but undeniably just principle, that the supreme rule is the "safety of the community;" salus populi suprema lex.

cases.

I have said that the lunatic is liable to all these inflictions, but it is pleasant to reflect that they are actually incurred in a very small proportion of I have recited them with the purpose of impressing strongly upon all who may in any way become responsible, the obligation they are under of nice and cautious discrimination, that in no instance they shall ever be needlessly, and therefore unjustly imposed.

On the other hand, equal care should be taken that the intent and purpose of the law, the attainment of security against insane violence and confusion, should not be rendered nugatory nor interfered with either by negligence or by misplaced pity. Such protection can only be fully provided by observation of the earliest irregularities of the erring intelligence, as the first steps in crime are checked by the proper officials. It is clear too that this primary supervision is best exerted by the medical attendant in the confidence of the family, friends, or person of the subject disordered. It is one of the duties of his province.

Statistical tables exhibit the large number of the notoriously insane; our police records every now and

then afford frightful intimation of the number, perhaps as large, that exist among us undetected or repressed; and unhappily but too ready at any time to manifest by some sudden outbreak, the lamentable morbid proclivity.

All writers on the subject dwell upon the difficulty often met with in drawing the line between insanity sufficiently matured and developed to exert an influence on the life and conduct of the patient, on the one hand, and on the other, certain conditions of eccen tricity, mere idiosyncracies of thought and action, entirely consistent with the sanity of the individual. How much more difficult must it be to discern and appreciate the slighter incipient aberrations so important to be noticed as affording warning and opportu nity. I fear indeed that we have little to hope for in this direction. The records of lunacy, full of strange and impressive incidents, present this embarrassment in a strong light. Of course where an attack is sudden, the time and occasion for arrest of action, for prevention of evil, will be wanting. In the contrasted class of cases, where the malady steals gradually on, although the attention of observers may be aroused, there will not occur, in the majority of instances, any single step so notably different from those which im mediately preceded it as to give useful alarm. A temper always irritable becomes more violent; habitual depression of spirits more gloomy; familiar oddity of manner more abrupt and eccentric. In such examples there lingers some remaining self-control, less and less exerted, or more and more overpowered

by the morbid impulse. But the reluctance of friends to accept the unwelcome intimation is sustained by the repeated occurrence of similar cases, in which the same aberrations fixing themselves as mere matters of habit, ceased to progress, and interfered little or not at all with the ordinary business or social relations of the individuals. As long as the shadow of hope remains there will be a not unreasonable shrinking, a pardonable unwillingness to incur the most irksome responsibility of entering upon the initiative restraints to be laid upon personal liberty. The stagnation of this timid inactivity is but too often doomed however to be startled into horror by some catastrophe, manslaughter, perhaps, or suicide.

Members of the bar have frequently and on fair grounds complained that they cannot obtain from our profession any clear, satisfactory, and accepted defini tion of insanity. Nay, I have heard one of the most eminent lawyers of our country declare, that such were the disappointments met with in the inquiry, that he had resolved never to engage again in the fruitless endeavor to draw a line between the insane and the sane, in any case admitting of reasonable doubt. We shall be wise, I think, in acknowledging modestly that we are not prepared to offer such a positive and sufficient definition as they have a right to ask. A definition must be both inclusive and exclusive; it must exclude everything foreign to the strict meaning of a term; it must include everything essential. It implies, therefore, a complete apprehen

sion of all the elements here associated and their re