them by the House of Lords.* "To us," says the writer, "it appears that the criminal's knowledge of his act being against law, so far from increasing his guilt (if there be any), establishes its diminution. It proves a greater amount of mental alienation, for it implies a mind not under the regulation of the ordinary rules of prudence and common sense. By it the

* QUESTION I. What is the law respecting alleged crimes committed by persons afflicted with insane delusion, in respect of one or more particular subjects or persons as for instance, where, at the time of the commission of the alleged crime, the accused knew he was acting contrary to law, but did the act complained of with the view, under the influence of some insane delusion, of redressing or avenging some supposed grievance or injury, or of producing some supposed public benefit?

ANSWER. The opinion of the judges was, that notwithstanding the party committed a wrong act, while labouring under the idea that he was redressing a supposed grievance or injury, or under the impression of obtaining some public or private benefit, he was liable to punishment.

QUEST. II. What are the proper questions to be submitted to the jury, when a person alleged to be afflicted with insane delusion, respecting one or more particular subjects or persons, is charged with the commission of a crime, murder, for example, and insanity is set up as a defence?

That

ANS. The jury ought in all cases to be told that every man should be considered of sane mind until the contrary were clearly proved in evidence. before a plea of insanity should be allowed, undoubted evidence ought to be adduced that the accused was of diseased mind, and that at the time he committed the act he was not conscious of right or wrong. This opinion related to every case in which a party was charged with an illegal act, and a plea of insanity was set up. Every person was supposed to know what the law was, and therefore nothing could justify a wrong act, except it was clearly proved that the party did not know right from wrong. If that was not satisfactorily proved, the accused was liable to punishment; and it was the duty of the judge so to tell the jury when summing up the evidence, accompanied by those remarks and observations which the nature and peculiarities of each case might suggest and require.

QUEST. III. In what terms ought the question to be left to the jury as to the prisoner's state of mind at the time when the act was committed ?

No answer was returned to this question.

QUEST. IV. If a person, under an insane delusion as to existing facts, com.mits an offence in consequence thereof, is he thereby excused?

ANS. If the delusion were only partial, the party accused was equally liable with a person of sane mind. If the accused killed another in self-defence, he would be entitled to an acquittal, but if the crime were committed for any supposed injury, he would then be liable to the punishment awarded by the laws to his crime.

QUEST. V. Can a medical man, conversant with the disease of insanity, who never saw the prisoner previously to the trial, but who was present during the whole trial and the examination of all the witnesses, be asked his opinion as to the state of the prisoner's mind at the time of the commission of the alleged crime, or his opinion whether the prisoner was conscious, at the time of doing the act, that he was acting contrary to law? or whether he was labouring under any, and what delusion at the time?

ANS. The question could not be put in the precise form stated above, for by doing so it would be assumed that the facts had been proved. When the facts were proved and admitted, then the question, as one of science, would be generally put to a witness under the circumstances stated in the interrogatory.

Mr Justice Maule agreed with the judges in respect to the answers returned to all the questions excepting the last; from this he entirely dissented. In his opinion, such questions might be at once put to medical men, without reference to the facts proved; and he considered that this had been done, and the legality of the practice thereby confirmed, on rial of M'Naughten.

homicide exhibits himself as uncontrolled by the strongest principle in the reasoning man's nature-self-preservation. For an object which is really worth nothing to him—and which derives all its importance from an imagination essentially deranged-he, knowingly and deliberately, sacrifices that boon to which the sane man instinctively clings the most tenaciously. Yet our law, according to the fourteen judges, affirms that this stronger proof of ungovernable madness, if absent, shall take the lunatic asylum-if present, shall hasten him to the scaffold!" The writer adverts also to that form of insanity of which so many cases are on record, homicidal monomania; in which the unhappy patients, "without mental delusion and free of hallucination, with intellectual powers and bodily health apparently unimpaired, exhibit a morbid perversion of the moral feelings and propensities, and an invincible instinct, which hurries them into moral wrong, despite the warnings of prudence, the teachings of conscience, the wrestlings of the understanding, or the strugglings of the will. To send such men as these to the scaffold is not to

serve, but to insult, justice."

In the Number for 22d July, p. 266, the editor discusses, in a very liberal and rational spirit, the question, What is the duty of medical men to Mesmerism? While bound to disbelieve marvellous assertions of which no sufficient evidence has been shewn them; on the other hand, says he, they are not, and, as philosophers, and searchers after the true, cannot be justified in treating Mesmerism with unenquiring credulity. "The time is past, and for ever, when the believer in any dogma, much less one which is thought to be founded on actual experiments, will renounce it on the derisive laugh, or the unexamining denial of any man. Your ipse dixit authorities were never held in less awe, or more suspicion, than in the present day. If the enthusiastic assertor of improved propositions receive a sigh from our pity, the unreasoning and bigoted opposer of the probable or the proved, extorts a smile from our contempt. Incredulity is not necessarily wisdom. Like every other state of mind, its worth depends on its justness in relation to the circumstances on which it is exercised. It is as likely to be in error as its extreme with some it is more likely. As medical men, our scepticism towards the new and the marvellous is greater, perhaps, than that of any other class. Our education has made so many wonders to the multitude plain things to us, that the inexplicable, whether new or old, becomes suspicious. There is no process in nature, however extraordinary, which is not satisfactorily accounted for to us by our professors. Nothing exists for which we have not a definite law and a definite action-and if we cannot explain terms by things, we can always explain, or try to explain,

things by terms-a marvellously agreeable mode of hiding from ourselves and others our ignorance. We are, too, a body forced into an acquaintance with not the brightest side of humanity, and are taught distrust by experience. All of us have heard, most had personal experience, of ingenious frauds. To be the dupe of imposture is an imputation on our professional skill; and the precocious sharpness and invulnerability to deception which we took credit for during the last months of our first session, are not allowed to forsake us when we can exercise them, with such increase to our credit, in a commencing or established practice. With this strong predisposition to incredulity, it is not wonderful that many of us make our readily formed judgments the arbiters of what is probable or possible, without any great care as to the asserted facts or nice abstract reasonings as to the soundness of our premises. It is new, it is extraordinary, it is unknown, or dissimilar to our experience: ergo, it is false. Now what makes this procedure the more captivating is, that nine times out of ten-ay, ninety-nine times in the hundred-it will be correct. We know that nine-tenths of the patents which cost so much money to secure, are left unworked; and of the schemers who surround and tease us with improvements, how few, very few, shew they are not wasteful enthusiasts. But there is an exception; the one-hundredth may be more than a dream. How many pitied and scorned the man who resolved to float through the clouds in that frail handiwork of his-the balloon! How many laughed at him who launched the first steam-boat on the American waters! How many smiled at the idea of nature, through the agency of light, flinging off the most astounding likenesses in seconds! How few disbelieved Humphry Davy when he, who thought the discovery of the philosophers' stone not impossible, proved that gas, instead of peacefully lighting London, must destroy it by combustion! or Lardner, when he shewed the impossibility of doing that which afterwards so availed him-crossing the Atlantic in a steamer! or that careful inventor who secured a patent to prevent the friction which would otherwise make railroad travelling impossible! Beyond the plainly incongruous, and what is evidently selfcontradictory, we know not what is impossible.

To

our medical brethren we say, then, on Mesmerism, as on every novelty in science, let us doubt till we know let us nurse suspense of judgment till inquiry remove it. The philosopher, faithful to science, like the true believer in religion, tries all things, and holds fast by that which is true.' It is only by acting thus that medical men can be worthy of their profession, or maintain its respect in the eyes of discerning or unprejudiced society, or that any generation of us can pass into the tomb without being eternally stained like those who,

preceding us, witnessed and opposed the innovations of a Harvey, a Jenner, a Hunter, and so many other marvelmongers.'" Again, the reviewer of Mr Lang's book on Mesmerism, in the Number for 23d September, says, “As a body, the profession is justified in the position they maintain with respect to this doctrine, provided their disbelief shut not out inquiry. Credulity here is infinitely more dangerous to truth than philosophic scepticism. Knowing this, we cannot blame the profession for whatever caution they may manifest on the subject; but, we say, let those who have tastes and talents for the investigation persevere, and when the proper time arrives, the profession will shew that it has neither been insensible to all that is passing around it, nor forgetful of the interests of the public.'

The Paris correspondent of the Medical Times, writing on 3d August, says," M. Rivail has read a memoir to the Phrenological Society, in which he concludes, that Phrenology ought to be divided into three branches,-1st, organologia cerebralis-a branch which treats of the different parts of the brain affected to each faculty; 2nd, facultologia, which treats of the different faculties, and their union with each other; 3d, cranioscopia, which treats of the influence the brain exercises on the form of the skull, and of the external signs by which the development of these organs may be appreciated."-P. 315. In a previous Number (29th July), p. 283, the same correspondent gives some particulars respecting the number of insane persons in France and Belgium, and the proportion of cases attributed to moral and physical causes. The only other article in the Medical Times that we think it necessary to refer to, is a letter from Dr Thomas Smethurst of Ramsgate, published on 16th December, under the title of "Mesmerism Unmasked." Dr S. there exposes what appears to have been an attempt to convince the spectators, by a juggling trick, that a boy, whose face was covered with a mask, could receive, through, or in spite of, its opaque substance, impressions enabling him to read, play at dominoes, and so forth. Whether the operator, Mr W. H. Weekes, a surgeon of Sandwich, will acquiesce in the accuracy of Dr Smethurst's narrative, remains to be seen.

4. The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal.

This work seldom contains any thing deserving attention peculiarly in a phrenological point of view. In the Number for January 1843, there is "An Account of Several Cases of Spectral Illusions, with Observations on the Phenomena, and on the states of bodily Indisposition in which they occur; by Robert Paterson, M.D., physician to the Leith Dispensary."

The author's materials are not very well put together; but his cases are interesting and instructive. He concurs with Hibbert and Brewster in the opinion, that "the mind's eye" is actually the body's eye, and that the retina is the common tablet on which both the images of external objects and those coined by the brain are painted; quoting Shakspeare's phrase as profoundly philosophical, and literally true. We contested this theory in a former article (vol. viii. p. 545), and need not repeat what was there urged against it. Suffice it to remark, that did the picture exist on the retina, the apparition would partake of every motion of the eye-which seldom, if ever, happens. There is no apparent necessity for first creating a spectre in the brain, next sending it out through the optic nerve to the retina, and lastly, returning it to the brain in order to be perceived. Surely the brain which imagines a spectre may be allowed the power of immediately perceiving what itself has created! The blind occasionally see apparitions, as is proved by Dr Macnish in his Philosophy of Sleep, by the case of a patient of his own; and if any blind ghost-seer, or even dreamer, could be found, in whom no retina existed, the doctrine we oppose must be at once abandoned by its supporters. We have made inquiries in the Edinburgh Asylum for the Blind, but have not discovered among the inmates any case of entire absence of the eyeballs. Some of those whom we questioned, stated, that they occasionally dreamed of seeing external objects. But it appeared that such dreams visit only those who have enjoyed vision at a period of life within their recollection. Persons blind from

infancy said they dreamed only of having such sensations as they have while awake. We could not discover that any blind person in the Asylum had seen apparitions. If any of our readers can throw light on the subject, we beg to be favoured with a communication.

VI. Our Library Table.

1. The Zoist, No. III., for October 1843.-Upwards of fifty pages of this Number are occupied by an account of the proceedings of the meeting of the Phrenological Association at London, in July last. The Report of the Committee, Dr Elliotson's Introductory Address, and apparently one or two of the other papers read, are published entire; while, of the remainder, abstracts only are inserted. For a sketch of these proceedings, we refer to our section of "Intelligence." Article II. is a letter from Mr Arthur Trevelyan, expressing his regret that he had, without sufficient consideration, appended his signature to the Declaration of certain members of the