218 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



tive. During the late war, nostalgia found quite a number of victims 

 among the soldiers of the Landwehr ; and, on a late journey to Alsatia, 

 I satisfied myself that it affected the soldiers from Silesia and Pome- 

 rania. 



Sagar says that love of country is strongest with those who are 

 nearest to a state of nature. This is quite correct. Savages, men liv- 

 ing under the rudest forms of civilization, in the most uninviting 

 climates, grieve when they quit them. Foissar relates that a Lapp, 

 brought to Poland, where every kindness was shown him, was seized 

 with incurable sadness, and at last escaped and returned to his inhos- 

 pitable country. Greenlanders who had been taken across to Den- 

 mark, risked certain death by trusting themselves to slight canoes to 

 cross the ocean separating them from their own land. Similar facts 

 have been observed among the North American Indians. Albert men- 

 tions the story of a young squaw, Courame, a foundling in the forest, 

 adopted by a rich family. " Take me back," she exclaimed, " take me 

 back to the land where I was born. O mother ! have you quite for- 

 gotten me ? " Courame fell ill, and wasted away. One day, falling 

 in with some Indians of her tri*be, she made her escape with them. 

 Strange affinity ! that unconquerable attachment of man to the soil, 

 the climate, the aspect of the narrow-bounded region in which his 

 childhood had been spent ! What an argument to oppose to our inter- 

 national and humanitarian philosophers ! 



What, then, is this strange disease ? Most physicians class it as a 

 variety, one form, of insanity, a. sort of mania or melancholy, Benoist 

 de la Grandiere does not so regard it ; he discovers in it a nervous 

 affection of the organs through which imagination and memory act. 

 The very clear distinctions which he points out between nostalgia and 

 other kinds of mental derangement justify his way of viewing it. 

 Indeed, the nostalgic patient has no such senseless or extravagant 

 notions as madmen have. He never fancies himself possessed of a 

 devil, or changed to a wolf or a dog. He is not swayed, as are the 

 melancholy-mad, by the dread or terror of some imagined ill. On the 

 other hand, the subjects of mania, or hypochondria, are usually in good 

 health ; in spite of their deranged intellects, they retain their strength 

 and good condition. The deep sadness of the nostalgic patient, on 

 the contrary, produces its first effect by changing the functions of 

 nutrition in him, and causing disturbances that are often fatal to life. 

 The various conditions of insanity are hereditary, while nostalgia 

 never is so. Besides, the especial characteristic of this disorder is that 

 it may be cured with absolute certainty, when the troubles it has 

 brought about have not yet endangered the health; restoring the 

 patient to his family effects a complete cure. On the contrary, the 

 attempt to satisfy an ambitious madman's dreams of greatness or of 

 wealth, far from lessening his mental derangement, will only give it 

 new violence. 



