MENTAL DIFFERENCE AND DISORDER. 231 



selves on the supremacy of their reason and the subjugation 

 of their mere feelings. Passion, feeling, or emotion, then, 

 of any kind, may become, in other animals as in man, not 

 only immoderate, but uncontrollable, and its intensity may 

 be such as to defy the power of expression otherwise than 

 by paralysis of motion and of mind. 



The habit of anger constitutional irritability frequently 

 passes into mania, e.g. in the mandrill (Maudsley) . It is apt 

 to do so where it is continuous or intense, and where the 

 cause of provocation remains for some length of time. A 

 depressant effect may follow the excitant one in such a case : 

 it may lead to dementia rather than to mania, or to the 

 former through the latter. 



We are told of a military elephant becoming 'frantic 

 with rage and disappointment' at not being allowed to em- 

 bark for foreign service with his regiment. 'No means 

 could be found to assuage the grief or to calm the anger of 

 this faithful creature, who so constantly mourned the loss of 

 his friends.' In certain monkeys and some kinds of dogs, in 

 the parrot also, anger is only too apt to become irrestrain- 

 able, to merge into a fury frightful in its intensity (Pierquin) . 

 It is as liable, in other animals as in man, moreover, to 

 occurrence in. fits, gusts, paroxysms, outbursts, or ebullitions. 

 Their incidence is frequently sudden, their duration short or 

 transient, their subsidence gradual and imperceptible, and 

 their causation trivial. 



It would appear to be a morbid combativeness or irrita- 

 bility that leads the hamster to attack with ferocity every- 

 thing, animate or inanimate, with which it is for the moment 

 angry. This ferocity is marked or accompanied by utter 

 recklessness as to the size or nature of the offending or 

 offensive object. The animal shows no dread even of fire or 

 of red-hot bodies, turning fiercely on a bar of red-hot iron 

 and clinging tenaciously to it till burned to death (Wood). 



In the ' heat of passion ' there is, in other animals as in 

 man, an absence of reflection and of the power of self-con- 

 trol, action being determined solely by impulse. The result 

 is that other animals, like man, are, in such circumstances, 

 hurried into acts which they afterwards probably regret, and 



