MENTAL DIFFERENCE AND DISORDER. 203 



remained motionless and apathetic for a whole day, and was 

 then found dead. 



The influence of sex in the production of mental disturb- 

 ance is perhaps best seen in the morbid mental phenomena of 

 maternity and the conditions which precede, accompany, and 

 succeed it, in the female that is, of pregnancy, parturition, 

 and the puerperal state. These conditions, which are both 

 physiological and pathological, or, while always the one, are 

 only too apt to pass into the other, render the female sex, as 

 in man, peculiarly liable to mental disturbance, and in so 

 doing they constitute sometimes a merely predisposing, at 

 other times an immediate or exciting, cause. 



Pregnancy shows its morbid influence in many acts of 

 the lower animals, e.g. in the murderous propensity of the 

 queen bee. In her, retardation of the process of egg-lay- 

 ing leads to mental derangement, and thereby to blunders 

 and the introduction of domestic and political confusion 

 (Figuier). Chillingham cattle are dangerous when calving 

 (Aylmer). ' During the period of procreation the mother 

 (whale) is much fiercer and more dangerous to approach 

 than at other seasons, when it is a timid, harmless animal ' 

 (Brown). At the period of parturition or whelping in the 

 bitch according to Walsh the animal becomes watchful 

 and suspicious, and is apt to destroy its young for the most 

 trivial reasons such as the approach of strangers or the 

 slightest interference with its litter. Buckland also has 

 commented on the frequency, in various other animals, of 

 murder of the young by the mother while in the puerperal 

 state, and on the triviality of the exciting cause the least 

 disarrangement of, or interference with, the cage, nest, litter, 

 mother, or young. And Jesse, too, refers to parturition, as 

 well as absence of milk, as causes of cannibalism of the 

 female parent devouring her own offspring. 



Female ruminants, while rearing their young, are full of 

 fears or suspicions (Houzeau). The tyrant shrike becomes 

 quarrelsome during incubation, and infuriated at the approach 

 of intruders (Baird). And it is common for other incubating 

 birds fiercely to attack even man in the neighbourhood of 

 their nests. Here there is probably or apparently a morbid 



