emir) 
ego or conscious personality, than for its effect on the mechanism 
of memory. These cases showed that personality or ego did 
not depend entirely on memory ; but it was so difficult to define 
personality that one could only conceive it as a bodily condition, 
Or organic consciousness, that being constantly renewed, was 
nothing more than a habit. Another variety of periodic amnesia 
comprised somnambulism. Usually sleepwalkers after an attack 
had no recollection of what they had done in it, but in each crisis 
they recollected what took place in previous crises. 
Progressive amnesia was a condition of memory in which the 
impairment was slow, but continuous, resulting in the complete 
destruction of the memory. The development of the disease 
was so gradual as to conceal its gravity. It was a common 
symptom of general paralysis, and lunatic asylums were full of 
patients of this class, who, on the day after entry, insisted that 
they had been there for a year, or many years. Recollection, 
hewever, of what was done and acquired before the onset of the 
disease, was retained with great tenacity. Partial amnesia 
furnished them with almost miraculous cases, and were they not 
authenticated beyond doubt one would hesitate to believe in 
them. That a person should be deprived of his recollection of 
certain words and retain the rest of his memory intact; that he 
should forget entirely one language and remember others ;_ that 
there should be a loss of memory for music and nothing else, 
seemed hard to imagine. But if they remembered that they 
were accustomed to apply the word memory to an independent 
function, a faculty, or a personified abstraction, whereas it was 
really a compound expression, and that it might be resolved into 
memories, they would understand the seeming impossibilities. 
Aphasia and hyperamnesia were other forms of memory disease. 
Giving instances of varying forms of this latter, he said there were 
few of them who had not at some time had the impression that 
some state they found themselves in, or some object they were 
seeing presumably for the first time, had been experienced or seen 
on a prior occasion. He took it that these were awakenings of 
the memory due to a prior impression forgotten by ourselves 
until now excited by some external cause similar to the one which 
first impressed it. Again, there were many accounts of drowning 
persons saved from imminent death who agreed that at the 
moment of asphyxiation they seemed to see their whole lives 
unrolled before them in minute detail. These cases showed a 
hyperintensity of action on the part of the memory of which they 
could have no idea in the normal state. These cases would also 
seem to indicate that nothing is really lost in memory, however 
fleeting and trivial the primitive acquisition might have been, but 
that all were not preserved to the conscious memory except under 
the impulse of some supreme emotion such as would be 
experienced when in imminent danger of death. 
