On the Relations between Mind and Muscle. 175 



" The maid, alas ! her thoughts are gone, 



She nothing sees — no sight but one ! 



The maid, devoid of guilt and sin, 



1 know not how in fearful wise 



So deeply had she drunken in 



That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, 



That all her features were resigned 



To this sole image in her mind; 



KnA passively did imitate 



That look of dull and treacherous hate, 



And thus she stood in dizzy trance. 



Still jnctiiring that look askance, 



With forced unconscious sympathy, 



Full before her father's view." 

 Ill a similar manner persons contract the pronunciation of others ; a fact 

 that will account for national peculiarities of accent. The laugh of a 

 crowd, nay, its gestures and acclamations are often quite as much the re- 

 sult of this principle of imitation, as of similarity of feeling derived from 

 a common source. But the most remarkable instance of involuntary imi- 

 tative motions are observed in various disorders of the nervous system. 

 The contagiousness of hysterical exclamations and convulsions is known to 

 every one. Physicians are not unfamiliar with the communication of other 

 disorders of motion of a more serious nature ; such are the imitative forms 

 of epilepsy and chorea j to the latter of which we shall recur directly. Such 

 affections are not only without desire, but contrary to it. The influence 

 of the principle under consideration is of the last importance, not only in a 

 physical, but also in a political and moral point of view. It has too often 

 happened that the most atrocious crimes have been repeated by persons, 

 who are not only free from the operation of motives similar to those which 

 instigated the first perpetrators, but whose minds may loathe the very con- 

 templation of such actions, at the very time that the morbid impulse is 

 hurrying them on. It has long been matter of observation that one suicide 

 creates many. A remarkable fact of this kind is related by M. Andral. "A 

 few years since, at the Hotel des Invalides, a veteran hung himself on the 

 threshold of one of the doors of a corridor. No suicide had occurred in 

 the establishment for two years previously ; but in the succeeding fort- 

 niglit, five invalids hung themselves on the same cross-bar, and the 

 governor was obliged to shut up the passage. During the last days of the 

 empire, again, an individual ascended the column in the Place Vendome, 

 and threw himself down and was dashed to pieces. The event caused a 

 great sensation ; and in the course of the ensuing week, four persons 

 imitated the example, and the police were obliged to proscribe the entrance 

 to the column." Would that the influence of a morbid imitation were 

 confined even to self-murder ! Such, however, is far from being the case. 

 The study of that most awful of all kinds of mental alienation, the homi- 

 cidal monomania or murder madness, reveals but too many facts confirmatory 



