WILLIAM G. STEVENSON. 79 
genius is related to, and dependent upon, bodily imper- 
fections. 
In trying to establish the kinship between mental 
greatness and disease, Mr. Sully states, what I do not 
deny, that ‘‘a number of great men have died from dis- 
ease of the nerve-centers,’’ naming Pascal, Cuvier, Men- 
delssohn, Mozart and Heine—none of whom, however, 
were insane. 
That genius should be subject to ‘‘all the ills that 
flesh is heir to’’ challenges neither surprise nor dissent ; 
but to hold this as evidence in support of the idea that 
‘‘the extreme mind is near to extreme madness”’ is, as 
it seems to me, an erroneous interpretation of physiolog- 
ical and pathological facts. 'To prove that Pascal died 
in convulsions from an acute brain trouble, in connection 
with a disease of bodily organs, and that Mendelssohn 
and Rousseau died of apoplexy, and Heine of spinal 
disease, is not proof that there was any essential weak- 
ness or disease of nerve-element, but rather is it evidence 
of disease of blood-vessels through faulty nutrition. 
When hemorrhage occurs in the brain, its substance is 
disorganized, as it might be if any other foreign sub- 
stance were forced into it, and nervous disturbance very 
naturally follows ; and possibly secondary nervous or 
mental disease, but it is not correct to speak of the pri- 
mary apoplexy as a disease of the brain, or to infer that, 
because a person of high mental endowments has thus 
suffered, therefore, as Lamartine says, ‘‘Genius bears 
within itself a principle of destruction, of death, of mad- 
ness.”? Cuvier, after a life of incessant intellectual toil, 
with mind unclouded, died at the age of sixty-three, 
from paralysis of the throat and lungs. Kepler, sound 
in mind, died when sixty years old of fever, which some 
say caused an abscess in the brain. The cause of Mozart’s 
death is unknown; his sickness was of short duration. 
He thought himself poisoned, but the facts were hidden 
