102 DEEAMS AND DELUSIONS. 



such a dread may be the cause of the most serious accidents 

 to human life. Not only so, but morbid fear may not be 

 confined to white paper, or other white objects, whether in 

 motion or at rest. It may gradually extend until it becomes 

 general, assuming that most dangerous perhaps of all forms 

 of insanity panphobia. 



So simple and common a series of incidents affords 

 matter for grave consideration, illustrating as it does 



1. The groundless, and therefore morbid, terror produced 

 in many animals by the most harmless inanimate objects, if 

 in motion, or seen under special circumstances. 



2. The danger to human life arising from temporary and 

 trivial disabilities mental or bodily in domestic animals. 



3. The simplicity and efficacy of judicious treatment ; 

 and 



4. The great influence for good which man possesses, but 

 so seldom exercises, over subject animals, his beasts of 

 burden or carriage. 



The deceptions produced by the mirror, by paintings, by 

 stuffed animals, by representations of man or other animals, 

 for instance in scare-crows, furnish instances of sane delusions, 

 compatible with, and accompanying sanity of mind and 

 body in all other respects, and there are obviously hosts of 

 other errors of animals that are based on delusions, sensorial 

 or other. In truth, all the common errors of the imagina- 

 tion in sane ordinary animals may be considered sane 

 delusions. 



Of special interest are sensory delusions, those connected 

 with the senses of vision and hearing in particular, because 

 among other reasons they illustrate the transition of sane 

 into insane delusions, with the difficulty, or impossibility 

 sometimes of drawing the line between them, of distinguish- 

 ing the one from the other. Moreover, the same kind of 

 delusions of sight and sound occur equally in canine rabies 

 and human hydrophobia. They occur, further, in the same 

 animal, and possibly at the same time : in which case it 

 may be difficult to determine whether vision or hearing, 

 singly, or both, are affected, and in the latter case which 

 was the primary, and which the secondary, affection. Thus 



