186 CAUSATION OF MENTAL 



lowed by a permanent timidity, that permitted the animal 

 to feed only in its master's presence (' Animal World'). In 

 this case the unfamiliar alarming object and spectacle 

 especially the spreading of the gorgeous tail was associated 

 with the unexpected and startling cry of the beautiful bird 

 in the causation of the result in the cat. In the hare, fox 

 or other hunted animals the effect of incessant alarm and 

 anxiety cannot be dissociated from that of want of food, 

 exposure to the weather, exhaustion of the race for life 

 against horse or hound. In panics during prairie, city, or 

 farmyard fires, terror from the glare or light, the sense of 

 helplessness or despair from the inability to escape from the 

 tether, stall, or stable, the physical pain of being scorched 

 or burned all combine to ( madden ' horses, cows, or other 

 domestic or wild animals. 



In many cases it is not easy to determine which of the 

 senses is the medium or channel of the impression that dis- 

 turbs the mind. Thus in the cat bird, frightened by a hare- 

 skin, either sight or smell may have been the sense affected, 

 or both may have been affected in equal or different degrees. 



In the production of a given result there is frequently a 

 combination or co-operation of causes of different kinds, both 

 mental and physical. Thus there is both an obvious physical 

 cause bodily pain, associated with a mental one, terror in 

 the case of reindeer bit by lemmings, the combined result 

 being that the ' maddened ' reindeer plunge, bite, tread, and 

 stamp wildly, unintentionally killing in large numbers the 

 causes of their torments. 



From the usual complexity of the causation, and the 

 multiplicity of the causes of mental disturbance in the lower 

 animals, the frequent remoteness and indirect operation of 

 these causes, their accumulation and intensification by re- 

 peated inheritance, the determination in them of the etiology 

 of insanity is attended with the same kind of difficulties as 

 in man. 



Often there is no apparent cause of mental derangement. 

 Even insanity is, or appears to be, spontaneous or idiopathic 

 in its origin or growth ; or the cause is trivial in reality or 

 appearance, inadequate or disproportionate to the result. 



