124 The American Naturalist. [February, 
was unusually silent at a cabinet council, was for once intent 
on affairs of state, when he suddenly exclaimed “I have sat at 
this window for an hour, and so many cabs, carriages and 
wagons have passed in that time.” Not one word had he 
heard of the affairs of State! Yet Ferdinand was not so weak 
minded but that in calm times he could officiate as a crowned 
puppet. I think therefore we may say that the Austrain 
Hapsburgs have almost entirely escaped the taint of insanity ; 
the line has produced numerous sovereigns distinguished by 
exceptional abilities and virtues such as Maximilian IT, Maria 
Theresa, Joseph II, and the present Emperor Francis Joseph. 
On the abdication of his uncle, who wept for the dumplings, 
Francis Joseph, in most troublous times, was placed at the 
helm of State, and up to the present time, by the personal af- 
fection and the confidence he inspires, and by marvellous 
political tact, he has kept his heterogeneous dominions under 
his rule; perhaps the only man living who could have held 
such jarring elements together. 
The House of Romanoff. Peter the Great, the founder of 
. his family’s greatness, presented a strange admixture of oppo- 
site qualities. One of Peter’s brothers was imbecile, and the 
history of the Romanoff family leaves little doubt that there 
goes in them a tendency to insanity, latent or declared. 
In Peter the Great we see on the one hand a man of extra- 
ordinary and commanding genius, whose ideas made, and still 
rule, modern Russia: a man who by sheer force dragged bar- 
barous, semi-Asiatic Muscovy into the comity of European 
nations; and who with far seeing glance recognizing the vital 
necessity of a navy for Russia, did not disdain with that end 
in view to work as a common shipwright. On the other hand 
we see a drunken boor; subject to paroxyms of ungovernable 
fury ; ferociously cruel; in a word showing the worst attributes 
of an utter savage. 
Truly here we see the “beast within the man.” But it 
seems as though his very superiority of brain makes the beast 
in man to so transcend all evil qualities of a beast of prey tha 
one can hardly wonder that the human imagination conceived 
devils as the moving agents of such horrors. No wild beast’s 
