POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



425 



in the soles and palms, which accompanies 

 certain diseases in some people, is a cause of 

 sleeplessness that will give way to sponging 

 the parts with vinegar and water. Wake- 

 fulness is sometimes the result of lack of 

 food, and a glass of cold water or pale ale, 

 or the eating of a sandwich, will, by setting 

 up activity in the abdominal organs, divert 

 the superabundant blood from the head, thus 

 removing the cause of the unnatural activity 

 of the brain. One reason why the most gift- 

 ed minds have frequently been afflicted by 

 sleeplessness is because bodily exercise is 

 too often neglected by people devoted to in- 

 tellectual pursuits. For such persons there 

 is no better soporific than muscular exertion, 

 carried even, in extreme cases, to a sense of 

 fatigue. 



Criminal Responsibility of the Insane. 



— It is a difficult matter to define with any- 

 thing like precision the point at which we 

 should cease to regard crime as the result of 

 depravity and begin to treat the wrong-doer 

 as the victim of disease. Prof. C. J. Cul- 

 lingworth, of Owens College, thinks that 

 certain forms of insanity are not properly 

 regarded in the practice of the English crim- 

 inal courts. In 1843 the House of Lords 

 obtained from the judges who had acquitted 

 the murderer McNaghten, on the plea of in- 

 sanity, the opinion that, " to establish a de- 

 fense on the ground of insanity, it must be 

 clearly proved that at the time of commit- 

 ting the act the party accused was laboring 

 under such a defect of reason from disease 

 of the mind as not to know the nature and 

 quality of the act he was doing, or, if he did 

 know it, that he did not know he was doing 

 what was wrong." Ever since it was put 

 forth, this test has been treated as though it 

 were the law of the land. It is, however, 

 far from satisfactory, in that it restricts 

 mind to the intelligence, and ignores the 

 emotions and the will. Now it is by no 

 means unusual to find the disorder of the 

 emotions and the will far greater than that 

 of the intellect, and especially in the cases 

 of those whom insanity is most likely to im- 

 pel to criminal acts. It is a common experi- 

 ence in lunatic asylums to find that the very 

 persons who are the most dangerous to 

 themselves and those about them are the 

 most intelligent inmates in the institution. 



This is not a purely medical view of the 

 question. Sir James Stephen has said : " No 

 doubt there are cases in which madness in- 

 terferes with the power of self-control, and 

 so leaves the sufferer at the mercy of any 

 temptation to which he may be exposed. . . . 

 I do not think that a person unable to con- 

 trol his conduct should be the subject of 

 legal punishment." Here we are brought 

 face to face with the fiercely disputed ques- 

 tion whether there is or is not such a thing 

 as irresistible impulse — that is, whether per- 

 sons apparently sane, and at any rate free 

 from obvious delusion, may be impelled to 

 insane acts by a force that they can not 

 control. " I can not deny that medical wit- 

 nesses have sometimes pressed this doctrine 

 of irresistible influence unduly ; still, there 

 are undoubtedly cases where the insanity re- 

 veals itself chiefly, if not solely, in acts of 

 violence, the consequence of uncontrollable 

 impulse. The popular notious that one man 

 can recognize lunacy as well as another, and 

 that it invariably betrays itself by definite 

 and unmistakable symptoms, are altogether 

 erroneous. In a lunatic asylum the raving 

 maniac is an exception, the majority of the 

 inmates being quiet, orderly persons, who 

 present, so far as their outward appearance 

 goes, little or nothing to distinguish them 

 from other people. Probably no one visits 

 such an institution for the first time without 

 being puzzled to know which are the officials 

 and which the inmates. Like other chronic 

 disorders, insanity is apt to come on insid- 

 iously. A certain alteration of manner, a 

 disposition to talk a little more or a little 

 less than usual, an unaccustomed reckless- 

 ness in expenditure, a tendency to be sus- 

 picious of those who have hitherto been im- 

 plicitly trusted, a slight failure in business 

 capacity — these may be all the symptoms 

 that mark the departure from mental health, 

 until one day the smoldering insanity breaks 

 out in an act of violence. The analogy be- 

 tween epilepsy and those forms of insanity 

 which are accompanied with sudden out- 

 bursts is a very close one. The causes that 

 have been at work in each case have been 

 cumulative in their action, and only when 

 the accumulated irritation has reached a 

 certain degree of intensity has there been 

 any, or but the very slightest, outward indica- 

 tion of the gathering storm. The spectacle 



