194 ACQUIRED CHARACTERS sec. 



habits of life. This suspicion became apparently a certainty 

 when the student, notwithstanding the remonstrances, re- 

 quests, and threats of his troubled parents, never wrote 

 a letter home, not even for money. Arguments on my 

 part succeeded in obtaining promises from him, but these 

 were never fulfilled. In the meanwhile, discreet inquiries 

 elucidated the fact that the student in other respects led a 

 thoroughly regular life ; that he generally went home before 

 midnight, and went to bed; and in particular, that he exercised 

 in all his other affairs a painstaking orderliness, as being the 

 son of a merchant he had always been accustomed to do. His 

 landlady stated that latterly, as always previously, when he 

 went away for a day he gave up his key to her in a sealed 

 packet. 



On account of these facts I became convinced that the 

 young man must be suffering from a local inflammation of 

 the brain, or that a local inflammation of the cerebral mem- 

 brane must be causing pressure on a certain portion of his 

 brain, and that therefore a part of this organ which influenced 

 the activity of the will towards the particular direction of 

 letter-writing, and towards this alone, was for the time func- 

 tionless ; for the mental abilities of the subject and his 

 power of will were, and are still, in other respects normal, 

 apart from the effects of the great amount of sleep he required. 

 His general force of will is, however, only moderately de- 

 veloped. I was confirmed in this conviction by the fact that 

 at times symptoms appeared in him which might well be 

 ascribed to temporary increase of a chronic local inflamma- 

 tion of the cerebral membrane, symptoms some of which had 

 a similarity to those of cramp of the neck, of meningitis 

 cerebrospinalis, although no fever ever appeared. After 

 constant medical treatment the student now, after some 

 months, is apparently well and healthy, only he cannot be 

 induced to write a letter. 



