MENTAL DIFFERENCE AND DISORDER. 237 



Other animals are sometimes, like man, directly ' frightened 

 oat of their wits,' as in the case of a squirrel cited by Prof. 

 Adams. Pierquin mentions a parrot whose intelligence was 

 destroyed by fright ; that is to say, the animal was thereby 

 rendered mentally imbecile or insane. Fright sometimes 

 leads the dog to be ' beside itself ; ' it becomes unable to eat, 

 glares, growls, and pants in terror (Cobbe). 



Fright, and all other kinds of mental shock, do not 

 operate solely by virtue of the suddenness or unexpectedness 

 of the sensory impression, or of the nature of this impression 

 itself. There must generally pre-exist in the animal a certain 

 predisposition or idiosyncrasy a tendency to be readily 

 startled or alarmed with an imaginative liability to exag- 

 gerate, or to create ideas of, danger. In other words as has 

 been said also of fear the animal, in whom fright is apt 

 to produce the most serious effects, is usually one eminently 

 nervous or timid. In such animals, and in proportion to 

 their nervousness or timidity, sudden startling out of sleep 

 or rest, for instance ; unexpected peals of thunder or artil- 

 lery ; all kinds of unlooked-for sights and sounds especially 

 if suddenly presented or heard are apt to produce striking 

 results. And they do so in animals, sometimes, that cannot 

 be placed in the category of those that are specially timorous. 

 Thus fright is very common, from unfamiliar noises and 

 objects, in menagerie animals in general, in which case, how- 

 ever, captivity has engendered a morbid timidity and fear. 



The results to man of the frightening of animals with 

 which he is intimately associated, are sometimes fatal, 

 as in the case of a London coachman who was found killed 

 by fracture of the skull in his own stable, and whose death 

 formed the subject of an inquest at St. Mary's Hospital in 

 January, 1875. Evidence went to render it probable that he 

 had been kicked on the head by one of his own horses, which 

 he had frightened by going into the stable by night in his 

 night-dress and then suddenly striking a match. 



Despair the sense of hopelessness, of futility of effort 

 lends a spurious courage to the poor hunted animal ' at bay,' 

 genders a ferocity that may amount to real mania, attended 

 with imminent danger to the life of its foes, including that 



