394 MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN. 



1869. health. One of my daughters was also labouring under the same 

 symptoms, and was four months with her mother at Hastings 

 after the death of my son. All this I could have borne. It 

 attacked the spirits, but I could have held on as I have always 

 done ia sure reliance on the higher and wiser management which 

 ' shapes our ends.' But the heats of 1868 broke down the phy- 

 sical force, and gave a cough and weakness which was followed 

 up by the consequences you know of. Does it, upon the pre- 

 ceding showing, require the hypothesis of thirty years of over- 

 work to explain an attack of diabetes which yielded to the first 

 remedies, or rather to diet alone, in a week, and a stroke of con- 

 gestion of the brain which left no result but weakness ? I have 

 heard of overwork on all sides, and have seen people stare at 

 their own omission of all the misfortunes so called which have 

 come upon me in the last two years. 



I am now weak enough, but I gradually improve. I shall 

 soon get all the way upstairs foot over foot, that is, sans both feet 

 on one step at once, and without the banisters. At present it is, 

 after half is done, either a tug at the banister, or bring up the 

 second foot before you remove the first. Three weeks ago it 

 was this alternative the whole way. The stairs are a beautiful 

 dynamometer. 



I am very anxious about Arthur Neate. He has an ugly 

 cancerous tumour on the lower side of the left cheek, which 

 opinion decides variously cancer or no cancer ; but those who 

 think it cancer think it a very serious case. He is not aware of 

 the dangerous opinions. If they be correct the matter will be 

 beyond doubt in a few months. As yet there is no serious 

 internal symptoms, and such things have sometimes passed off. 

 Neate is about sixty-four. I turned the grand climacteric (sixty- 

 three) in June last (27th). 



August 30. So much for delays and feelings of inability. I get 

 on fairly, head and arms, but the legs do not thrive in proportion. 

 I sawed a plank of wainscot (hard wood) ; and a man who can 

 do that ought to walk three miles, but I do not do more than one. 



September 1. My wife, who was at the sea with my second 

 daughter and a bronchial cough to be got rid of, came home on 

 Saturday, and my daughter's cough nearly gone. 



A man cannot have the sort of attack I had without some 

 amount of evidence of it. I had two well-marked consequences for 

 several days, an inability and a delusion. 1. I could not for a 

 week master the word congestion as the name of my own attack. 



