On. the Relations between Mind and Muscle. 177 



liad a veliemeut desire for the sea, and flung themselves into it. The 

 disorder disappeared in its epidemic form, in the eighteenth century. 

 Hecker alludes to a similar affection which prevailed in Abyssinia, under 

 the name of Tigretier, and which has been described by our countryman, 

 Pearce. It had the same dancing character, and was soothed by music. 

 The irresistible tendency to imitation was strongly marked in the case of 

 a woman, (related by Tissot) who never could avoid doing anything which 

 she saw others do, and was consequently obliged to be blindfolded when 

 she walked the streets. To the operation of the same principle. Dr. Hecker 

 attributes certain fanatical exhibitions among the Jumpers in our own 

 country, whose fame, it appears, has extended to Germany. Locality is 

 often deeply concerned in the production of similar incidents. Thus we 

 are told by a French author, that a supposed miracle having been per- 

 formed before the convent of St. Genevieve, such a number of similar 

 occurrences happened on the same spot in a few days, that the police were 

 compelled to post a peremptory notice on the gate, " prohibiting any indi- 

 viduals from working miracles in the place in question." 



The limits prescribed to this essay, oblige me to abstain from further 

 remarks upon tliis subject, else it would be interesting to trace the imita- 

 tive instinct in certain of the lower animals, to shew its subservience to 

 various important purposes in our own species, such as its vast relations 

 with the moral and social condition of man, its connection also with the 

 facts that belong to animal magnetism, and with various kinds of mental 

 aberration. 



(6.) The last groupe of involuntary actions are those of habit ; a term 

 inclusive of a variety of most interesting motions, which although originally 

 produced by desire, have acquired an instinctive character. It is a law, no 

 less constant in the intellectual and moral, than in the corporeal oeconomy 

 of man, that actions which have frequently co-existed, or followed each 

 other in a certain succession, have a tendency to repeat that association or 

 sequence, even when the causes which originally produced them are no 

 longer acting. Thus, let A, B, and C, represent so many muscular mo- 

 tions which have followed each other, but which have each been efifected 

 by desire. After a repetition of their occurrence a certain number of times 

 in the same order, they will stand in the relation of causes and effects to 

 each other. It will no longer be necessary that an act of volition should 

 transpire between A and B, or between B and C ; but the mere occurrence 

 of A, will be enough to produce B, and B will have the same effect on C. 

 In our walking and active moments we can scarcely exist without affording 

 an illustration of this law. To walk, to run, to assume any ordinary atti- 

 tude, to perform any common manipulation, to speak, to write, is to 

 present an exemplification of the same principle. To all the elementary 

 motions of which these actions are composed, desire or volition was origi- 

 nally, perhaps, a necessary antecedent, but is such no longer. Let us take 



