When M. Georget ends with saying, "The natural terminations of insanity are permanent disease of the brain;" it is almost equivalent to saying, "the natural terminations of lameness are disease in the lower half of the body:" the expression is either decidedly opposed to fact, or has no meaning. Lameness and insanity get well often spontaneously, or are cured by art; and when they do not, it is because of the nature, extent, and duration of the disease spoiling the organ which caused the lameness or the insanity.

An old nurse came into the room where a medical consultation was being held, and said, "Pray, gentlemen, will you please to tell me how long my master's fever will last?"-" Why, nurse," replied the doctor.

that depends on its duration." "Thank you, sir," said the nurse, grateful for the information, and went away perfectly satisfied. Now the pupils of M. Georget have about equal reason to be thankful, and satisfied with the information afforded in this description of insanity.

There is so strange a discrepancy of opinion among writers on insanity as to the employment of bleeding, that one is surprised the public places faith in medical management of mental derangement.

Pinel says bleeding is always injurious.
Cullen approves of bleeding.

Esquirol condemns it.

Haslam recommends it.

Rush bleeds to the extent of thirty or forty ounces at a time.

Foville doubts about it, but uses it in the intermittent form.

Joseph Franck has a high opinion of it.

Fodéré, I think, condemns it.

Hitch and Dr. Shute proscribe it.

Pritchard approves it.

-Delightful harmony!

Now, it appears to me that to recommend bleeding in insanity, is exactly equivalent to recommending bleeding in illness. Mental derangement is caused or accompanied by so many disorders, that bleeding must be sometimes highly necessary, and sometimes decidedly injurious. The practitioner must decide on the whole case. Among this multitude of discordant counsellors, I may venture to suggest that a few leeches to the inside of the nose, where the patient will submit to it, will often give great relief, when he would be absolutely prostrated by the loss of a pint of blood from the arm. This is more especially true in persons past the middle age and of a gouty diathesis.

To what can the strange discrepancy of opinion as to the effect of bleeding arise? Such absolute opposition of sentiment is little calculated to inspire confidence in the medical men who are devoted to the subject of insanity,-when we find Rush stating the beneficial results of an abstraction of blood, amounting to from twenty to forty ounces at a time, taken from the patient while in an erect position; that he had taken away two hundred ounces of blood from a man sixty-eight years of age in less than two months, and from another man four hundred and seventy ounces in the course of seven months, one is struck with a wonder, which is certainly not admiration, at the audacity of the practice; and we should be extremely unwilling to subject a patient to his tender mercies. Such a mode of treatment would kill nineteen out of

twenty of the ill-fed herbivorous Frenchmen of the Salpetrière, however it might be sustained without instant destruction by feeders on flesh.

All that we can conclude from such lamentable discordance of opinion is, that bleeding is proper or improper in insanity, just as it is in other cases, and that we are not justified in resorting to it for the mental disturbance, except in the cases in which we should bleed without reference to it-plethora, inflammation, congestion, suppression of habitual sanguinous evacuations, and such analogous affections as would require the abstraction of blood were the mind in its natural state.

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CHAPTER XXIV.

CHANGE IN THE BRAIN FROM EXERCISE OF ITS FIBRES.

INSTINCT AND REASON. JACOBI'S REMARKS ON THE INTELLECT OF INSECTS. RATIOCINATION OF AN ELEPHANT.

WHEN we observe the wonderful dexterity of a juggler, acquired by long and laborious practice, we cannot but acknowledge that the skill we admire must be accompanied, if not caused, by some change in the muscles of the arm, which render it more rapidly obedient to volition. We can hardly suppose it to be a more rapid volition, for volition itself is so inconceivably swift that it seems to require absolutely no appreciable portion of time. The sensation of pain from heat, its transmission to the brain, its perception there, the transmission of the will to the organ endangered, and its withdrawal from the danger, are manifestly successive events; yet the whole take up (according to our senses) no portion of time; and this in muscles or brain not yet educated. It is probable, therefore, that the innumerable volitions exercised in the complicated movements of the conjurer are rather alteration of the muscles of the limbs in obedience to volition, than education of the exercise of the faculty of volition itself.

In like manner we may suppose that it is owing to the education of the cerebral fibres in the various acts of the understanding, which, as for example in arithmetical calculations, are at first accompanied by posi

tive pain as well as difficulty, that they become so easy as to be accomplished without a perceptible effort. I imagine then that a real physical change does actually take place in the parts of the brain exercised, as indeed phrenologists assert, and shew alterations in the external form of the skull, which there is every reason to believe to be the result of such exercise of certain fasciculi of nervous fibres in the brain. The head of the man who has called into action, to their full extent, the faculties bestowed upon him by the Creator, assumes a very different shape from that of the man who has "wrapped his talent in a napkin."

The brain of the man of education and skill, who has stored up a large quantity of acquired knowledge, who has used the faculties required in the process of adapting means to an end, may be fairly presumed to be, in some sense, of a different physical structure from that of the unexercised brain; as the muscles of the arms that have been cultivated incessantly by the juggler are, in a similar sense, different in physical structure from those which have been always left in torpid repose.

Now, in estimating the wonderful sagacity of insects and birds which exercise a constructive skill, that, to us who are intended only for progressive education, seems absolutely to require a long series of instruction and practice, are we not justified in supposing that it may arise from the bestowal on them all at once of exactly that structure of their organs of intellect which, in corresponding portions of the brain in the progressive animal, is the result of long prac tice and gradual accumulation? We cease then to be surprised that the first nest of the bird should