SOME CURIOSITIES OF THINKING. 729 



Tinable to fix his attention any longer on liis work, lapsing into 

 a state of apathy and mental inertia, disappointed at himself 

 and at his failure of interest, but incapable of arousing himself to 

 effort. This is not laziness it is an inherent mental defect. 



Again, there is a type of mind which seems deficient only in the 

 perception of the true relation between events and actions. These 

 people are the victims of their fancies. They are constantly 

 originating most impracticable undertakings. They expend their 

 energy in devising and attempting to carry out the most useless, 

 absurd, and extravagant schemes sometimes selfish, sometimes 

 apparently philanthropic. They appear to ignore or else can not 

 appreciate the force of common-sense objections, or the reality of 

 insuperable obstacles to their projects; and, finally, if they are 

 defeated, they never blame themselves, but either complain of 

 the lack of human sympathy, or become the victims of a delusion 

 that they are the objects of a conspiracy by enemies whose exist- 

 ence is purely imaginary. The patent office contains a striking 

 museum of such hopeless and visionary schemes and inventions. 



It is impossible in the study of defective minds to draw any 

 sharp lines between different individuals ; and we can not help 

 feeling that between the man of giant intellect on the one hand, 

 and the speechless idiot on the other, there is an unbroken line 

 of descent, and every possible variety of mental defect. 



It is in some of these degenerate brains that we find some of 

 the strangest curiosities of thinking, and some of those extraor- 

 dinary developments in one line of mental capacity with a corre- 

 sponding suppression of all other lines. One has only to think of 

 such an individual as " Blind Tom,'' the pianist, who was a genius 

 in music, able without instruction to reproduce upon the piano 

 with marvelous elaboration of harmony almost anything musical 

 which he had heard, and yet who was almost a brute so far as his 

 moral nature was concerned, and almost an idiot so far as his 

 intellectual powers could be measured. We might also cite a 

 remarkable person recently seen in New York, "Inaudi," who, 

 though until the age of twenty unable to read or write, because 

 too stupid to learn, and manifestly defective in mental capacity, 

 has a power of mathematical calculation which is most extraor- 

 dinary and inexplicable. The most abstruse problems m arith- 

 metic, such as cubes of numbers in four figures, or a square root 

 of figures in millions, it takes him but a few seconds to solve and 

 this he has been able to do ever since a little boy, without being 

 able at all to explain his methods of doing it. He is as accurate 

 as a calculating machine (and just about as intelligent on other 

 subjects). He relates his history as follows :* 



* New York Herald, March 25, 1894. 



