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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Curiosities of Nervousness. An inter- 

 esting book might be made out of the curi- 

 osities of nervousness from a contempo- 

 rary standpoint. The elder Disraeli has 

 somewhere a chapter on the subject ; but, 

 if our memory serves us correctly, his in- 

 stances trench rather upon the hysterical 

 conditions, the monomanias, the wild fan- 

 ciful delusions of the disordered imagina- 

 tion, than upon the prosaic features of the 

 distemper. He instances men who could 

 not bear the sight of old women, and faint- 

 ed dead away if a grandmother showed her- 

 self; others who, if they heard a rat in the 

 wall, took it for a ghost and got up and 

 prayed fervently; and such things. The 

 present age furnishes more rational imagin- 

 ings, born of the daily papers, emphasized 

 by indigestion, and riveted by the surprising 

 eloquence of the diurnal quidnuncs. For 

 instance, there are plenty of people living at 

 this moment who would warmly refuse to 

 get into bed before looking under it to make 

 sure that no man lay there. There are 

 others who pass the night in constant fear 

 of tire ; who, before they withdraw to their 

 bedchambers, carefully rake out every fire- 

 place in the house, turn off the gas, inspect 

 every room, knock on the servants' doors 

 and inquire through the key-holes if their 

 candles are out ; and after all this bother 

 go to bed and lie awake until the dawn with 

 their bedroom doors ajar, sniffing at imagi- 

 nary fumes of burning, and ready to spring 

 out and go raving mad should anything like 

 a cry be raised for these people never 

 make any serious provision against fire 

 should fire come. There are others, again, 

 who will lie night after night in expectation 

 of burglars. A distant footfall will court 

 them to the window, where, cautiously pull- 

 ing aside the blind by the breadth of a nose 

 (giving scope to one eye), they will peer in- 

 to the gloom and mistake some shadow for 

 the figure of a man (wrapped in an overcoat 

 and with a horse-pistol in every pocket), 

 intent upon the particular window whence 

 he is being w r atched. Others will be kept 

 awake by the song of the wind about the 

 casement, or in the empty rooms around, 

 confounding these natural sounds with the 

 murmur of human voices in the pantry, or 

 on the landing just outside. 



These are some of the hundred night 



fears beyond an ordinary imagination to ex- 

 press. But there are daylight fears as nu- 

 merous, if not always so agonizing. What 

 words can convey the horror felt by a cer- 

 tain kind of nervous people who, making a 

 journey on a railway, are suddenly brought 

 to a stand in a tunnel ? Nothing can com- 

 fort them. Their heads shoot through the 

 windows, their cries lacerate the gloom, and 

 the reassuring shouts of the guard only ag- 

 gravate their fright and provoke fresh yells 

 for immediate release. Or take the mental 

 condition of another kind of nervous per- 

 sons at sea. Every roll of the vessel means 

 imminent death. The carrying away of a 

 water-cask, the momentary stoppage of the 

 engines, the cry of a man on the lookout, 

 the escape of a sail from the gaskets that 

 confine it to the yard, and its consequent 

 bellowing upon the gale, the abrupt shipping 

 of a sea, nay, the tumbling of a steward 

 down a ladder, or the fall and smash of a 

 few plates from the leaning saloon table, 

 will strike an indescribable horror, and lead 

 to no end of convulsive clingings and mum- 

 blings of prayer. Indeed, it would be pos- 

 sible to fill every page in this journal with a 

 catalogue of the imaginative afflictions under 

 which nervous people labor. Old Doctor 

 Johnson, going back to touch an omitted 

 post, typifies a host of numerous disorders 

 which need not be mistaken for supersti- 

 tions, and which assume a vast number of 

 shapes among us in these days. Take a 

 pavement full of people with a ladder across 

 it from the house-top to the curbstone. 

 How many of the passengers will wade into 

 the mud of the road to save themselves 

 from passing under that ladder ? The pro- 

 portion of the nervous people in the world 

 will be happily indicated by such an exam- 

 ple. Of every hundred persons, we question 

 if ten would, without hesitation, pass under 

 that ladder. When a man refuses to make 

 his will, because he fears that by doing so 

 he will be hastening his death, are we not to 

 attribute his cowardice to the nerves ? It is 

 a mere convenient apology to call such mis- 

 givings superstitions. No one would hope 

 to cure a priest's faith in a winking Ma- 

 donna by a course of quinine ; and supersti- 

 tions of the real sort are assuredly not to be 

 corrected by medical treatment. But our 

 latter-day nerves are to be dealt with, and 



