6-o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



sion of bone, and the depressed portion was eventually removed by 

 the trephine. From that time an improvement took place in his dis- 

 position, his old self coming gradually back ; he became cheerful 

 again, active and obliging, regained and displayed all his former affec- 

 tion for his wife and children, and was at last discharged recovered. 

 No plainer example could be wished to show the direct connection of 

 cause and effect the great deterioration of moral character produced 

 by the physical injury of the supreme nerve-centers of the brain : 

 when the cause was taken away the effect went also. 



Going a step further, let me point out that disease will sometimes 

 do as plain and positive damage to moral character as any which direct 

 injury of the brain will do. A fever has sometimes deranged it as 

 deeply as a blow on the head ; a child's conscience has been clean 

 effaced by a succession of epileptic convulsions, just as the memory is 

 sometimes effaced ; and those who see much of epilepsy know well 

 * the extreme but passing moral transformations that occur in connec- 

 tion with its seizures. The person may be as unlike himself as possible 

 when he is threatened with a fit ; although naturally cheerful, good- 

 tempered, sociable, and obliging, he becomes irritable, surly, and mo- 

 rose, very suspicious, takes offense at the most innocent remark or act, 

 and is apt to resent imaginary offenses with great violence. The change 

 might be compared well with that which happens when a clear and 

 cloudless sky is overcast suddenly with dark and threatening thunder- 

 clouds ; and just as the darkly clouded sky is cleared by the thunder- 

 storm which it portends, so the gloomy moral perturbation is dis- 

 charged and the mental atmosphere cleared by an epileptic fit or a 

 succession of such fits. In a few remarkable cases, however, the 

 patient does not come to himself immediately after the fit, but is left 

 by it in a peculiar state of quasi-somnambulism, during which he acts 

 like an automaton, doing strange, absurd, and sometimes even crimi- 

 nal things, without knowing apparently at the time what he is doing, 

 and certainly without remembering in the least what he has done when 

 he comes to himself. Of excellent moral character habitually, he may 

 turn thief in one of these states, or perpetrate some other criminal 

 offense by which he gets himself into trouble with the police. 



There are other diseases which, in like manner, play havoc with 

 moral feeling. Almost every sort of mental derangement begins with 

 a moral alienation, slight perhaps at the outset, but soon so great that 

 a prudent, temperate, chaste, and truthful person shall be changed to 

 exactly the opposite of what he was. This alienation of character 

 continues throughout the course of the disease, and it is frequently 

 found to last for a while after all disorder of intelligence has gone. 

 Indeed, the experienced physician never feels confident that the recov- 

 ery is stable and sure, until the person is restored to his natural senti- 

 ments and affections. Thus it appears that when mind undergoes 

 decadence, the moral feeling is the first to suffer ; the highest acquisi- 



