58 FORMS OF MENTAL DEFECT AND DERANGEMENT. 



group of common, morbid mental phenomena. Fear is at all 

 times, and especially in naturally timorous animals, in asso- 

 ciation with imagination, apt to exaggerate the kind or degree 

 of threatened danger from things, persons, or other animals, 

 or to create ideas of evil where no real danger or cause thereof 

 exists. 



In many of the wild carnivora, for instance especially 

 perhaps in the wolf and fox fear frequently passes into sus- 

 picion, and the latter into delusion, as one of the results of 

 man's incessant persecution. Distrustfulness, arising in, or 

 consisting virtually of, an excess of caution, is common in 

 animals persecuted by snares such as the glutton (or wol- 

 verene) which has very good grounds or reasons for its 

 distrust or caution. But such distrust is always apt, in ani- 

 mals so hunted by man, and rendered so preternaturally alive 

 to the many forms in which danger may present itself and 

 to the necessity for avoiding all kinds of compassing perils, 

 to become morbid, and to be developed without sufficient 

 grounds, or absolutely without external grounds at all. In 

 short, the dread of danger is liable to become excessive, while 

 a morbid suspiciousness is apt to beget imaginary evils. 



What, in its first stage, may be set down to mere natural 

 timidity, may become, in its second, a morbid terror or dread 

 of one specific object, sound or sight, or of a very limited 

 number of such objects, sounds or sights, and in the third a 

 veritable panphobia a general and causeless dread of every- 

 thing of every animal and person that is not quite familiar 

 to the affected animal. This indiscriminate kind of alarm is 

 most commonly met with in the horse, though it is apt to 

 be developed in all animals that are constitutionally timorous 

 and nervous, that are easily startled by the most trivial 

 causes. It is frequently due to or associated with sensorial 

 defect or perversion, such as lesions of sight and hearing. 



It may arise then either entirely 



1. From an internal cause; or 



2. From one that is, in the first instance at least, external ; 

 or 



3. From conjoint internal and external causes, some- 

 times the one cause, sometimes the other taking the pre- 

 cedence. 



