Before narrating the case which is the basis of this communication, I shall briefly advert to the leading features, and the views held regarding the nature of the remarkable neurosis with whose discovery the name of the late eminent Dublin Professor, Dr. Graves, is most frequently associated. The dependence of the psychical and somatic phenomena on one cause, common to both, will thus be more clearly demonstrated, and the claim which it seems to me the disorder of the mind has to be regarded as a distinct form of insanity will be more apparent.

The life of the philosopher has for some minds a higher charm than that of a poet—the life of a practical worker a greater attraction than that of a student or dreamer—the career of an earnest living reality more than that of a mystic, or even of a professor of the ideal. The career of the natural phenomenon, whose name heads this article, embraced to a great extent all of these conditions. Born in an age when the dawn of a new creation was already beginning to climb over the hills by which men's minds were environed—at a time when the rude disentanglements, by processes new and strange, were shortly to make themselves felt among the believers in an old faith—when the first throes of the great moral volcano of modern times seemed to indicate but feebly its future terrible force—the mind of young Rousseau buds forth like some fragile blossom of spring pushing its sensitive shoots through the frozen snow on the mountains around his native town.

In the first and second volumes of the West Riding Asylum Medical Reports, 1871–72, there appeared two papers bearing my name, which were entitled, the one “The Sphygmograph in Asylum Practice,” and the other “The Sphygmograph in Epilepsy.” The first paper, besides containing a few general remarks, was, however, confined to the study of the physiology of General Paralysis; the other, as its name implied, referred entirely to certain phenomena observed in Epilepsy, and contained a few speculations as to the origin and nature of these phenomena. Both papers had been hastily prepared, though they really represented an amount of patient labour such as probably I shall never undertake again. The later one had also the disadvantage of being so cut and mutilated for want of space that, when finished, I hardly recognised my own work. I had begun to think that they were to be considered of no real value, and only fit to pass into the limbo of forgotten things, when they were suddenly snatched from a threatening oblivion by having assigned to them a prominent place in the new edition of the work so familiar to many engaged in this special branch of medicine by the names of Bucknill and Tuke. More recently they have been brought into further prominence by being incorporated into that clever, thorough work, “The Pathological Anatomy of the Nervous Centres,” by Dr. Long Fox, where the views originally advanced by myself are put in much clearer and more forcible language than I could ever master. It has occurred to me, then, that now is a good opportunity for considering de novo the bearings which these speculations may have on the further elucidation of the nature of the origin of two diseases, one of which, at least, has hitherto been enveloped in darkness, and which, because of such ignorance, has, until recently, baffled all attempts to effect anything like a certain cure.

This asylum is for the male and female lunatics of the Department of Ille et Vilaine, who, arranged according to their sex and class, on the day of my visit, were, in numbers, as follows:—