1 24 Heredity. 



always kept a light burning through the night. As this trouble- 

 some light prevented the son from sleeping, he put it out one 

 night, but his father, much agitated, bade him light it again. 



At length the young man went to visit a younger brother, who 

 was at school in a small town some fifty miles from Paris. The 

 schoolmaster's son said to him, almost at once : ' Has your brother 

 ever given any signs of insanity ? Last night he came downstairs 

 in his shirt, quite beside himself, declaring that he had seen his 

 mother's ghost.' * 



This fact can only be explained by supposing that the sons 

 derived from their father a tendency to hallucination under the 

 influence of their deep regret for their loss. 



A man in the Lyons hospital was subject simultaneously to 

 hallucinations of taste and smell ; tormented by disgusting odours 

 and tastes, he spent whole hours in blowing his nose and spitting. 

 His father had died in the same hospital from the effects of mania 

 with hallucination. 



We might also cite the famous Seeress of Prevorst, Frederika 

 Hauffe, whose life, together with a collection of her visions, was 

 edited by Kerner. This faculty of ' talking with the spirits ' was 

 shared by most of the members of the Hauffe family. Her 

 brother, in particular, possessed this gift, but in a lower degree, and 

 without the complication of the phenomena of ecstasy and cata- 

 lepsy which characterized the seeress. 2 



in. 



Among the morbid psychological affections to which Esquirol 

 gave the name of monomania, there is none the heredity of which 

 is better proved than that of suicide. Voltaire was among the 

 iirst to call the attention of physicians to this subject. 



' I have with my own eyes,' he writes, ' seen a suicide that is 

 worthy of the attention of physicians. A thoughtful professional 

 man, of mature age, of regular habits, having no strong passions, 

 and beyond the reach of want, committed suicide on the lyth of 

 October, 1769, leaving behind him, addressed to the council of his 



1 Brierre de Boismont, Des Hallucinations, p. 57. 



2 Lucas, ii. 769. 



