444 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



persons have gone insane on the subject, and are confined in asylums 

 in the United States ; but careful inquiry, made in consequence, has 

 happily disproved the statement, and we learn that the amount of 

 insanity produced from this cause is almost insignificant much less 

 than that caused by religious excitement. 



Looking broadly at the facts which force themselves upon our at- 

 tention, we may say that a study of the relation between modern life 

 and insanity shows that it is of a many-sided and complex character; 

 that the rich and the poor, from different causes, though certainly in 

 one respect the same cause, labor under a large amount of preventable 

 lunacy ; that beer and gin, mal-nutrition, a dreary monotony of toil, 

 muscidar exhaustion, domestic distress, misery and anxiety, account 

 largely, not only for the number of the poor who become insane in 

 adult life, but who, from hereditary predisposition, are born weak- 

 minded or actually idiotic ; that among the middle classes, stress of 

 business, excessive competition, failures, and, also in many cases, reck- 

 less and intemperate living, occasion the attack ; while in the upper 

 classes intemperance still works woe and under this head must be 

 comprised lady and gentlemen dipsomaniacs who are not confined in 

 asylums ; that while multiplicity of subjects of study in youth and 

 excessive brain-work in after-life exert a certain amount of injurious 

 influence, under-work, luxurious habits, undisciplined wills, desultory 

 life, produce a crop of nervous disorders, terminating not unfrequently 

 in insanity. In a state of civilization like ours, it must also happen 

 that many children of extremely feeble mental as well as bodily con- 

 stitutions will be reared who otherwise would have died. These 

 either prove to be imbeciles, or they grow up only to fall a prey to 

 the upsetting influence of the cares and anxieties of the world. A 

 considerable number of insane persons have never been really whole- 

 minded people ; there has, it will be found on careful inquiry, been 

 always something a little peculiar about them, and when their past 

 life is interpreted by the attack which has rendered restraint neces- 

 sary, it is seen that there had been a smouldering fire in the constitu- 

 tion for a lifetime, though now, for the first time, bursting forth into 

 actual conflagration. 



Lastly, modern society comprises a numerous class of persons, 

 well-meaning, excitable, and morbidly sensitive. Some of these are 

 always on the border-land between sanity and insanity, and their 

 friends are sometimes tempted to wish that they would actually cross 

 the line, and save them from constant harass. When they do, it is 

 easier to make allowance for them and their vagaries. 



Whatever uncertainty there may attach to some aspects of this 

 inquiry, unquestionable conclusions have been drawn ; and, if these 

 only accord with results arrived at from other considerations, they 

 are valuable as confirming them. Had there appeared to be among 

 the poor and ignorant a striking immunity from attacks of insanity, 



