are rather increased than impaired by the excitement of disease. That this was the case in Hall's instance, is rendered probable by a circumstance incidentally mentioned, which would have led a medical man to infer morbid action in the brain. It is remarked of Hall, when under examination, that where, from defect in his articulation, his answers were not understood, he explained his meaning by signs and otherwise, and was satisfied when he succeeded in conveying the true impression. Now, it so happens, that such a defect, when not natural, is one of the surest signs of disease in the head, and one of the most unpleasant symptoms in certain forms of insanity. Hall having subsequently committed suicide, no farther inquiry was made to determine the real state of his mind, but the event itself certainly increases the presumption that he was deranged.

X. A tenth case, also of recent occurrence, may be adverted to, as the subject is an important one. It is that of John Howison, who was executed at Edinburgh in January 1832, for the murder of an old woman at Cramond; a case which excited a great sensation at the time, as he was generally believed to be insane, although some professional witnesses were of a different opinion. The fact, however, was clearly established before his execution, when Howison solemnly accused himself of eight other murders, of which he was perfectly innocent, and denied as solemnly the one he was proved to have committed. Occurrences like these are too startling in their nature, and too revolting to every feeling of humanity, not to deserve more serious investigation than they have hitherto met with; and, on that account, we have ventured to notice them at some length, that attention may be directed to them, and their real nature ascertained. As a preliminary step we must, however, remove two objections which are often advanced against the plea of insanity, even in very clear cases.

It is argued, that to respite such irresponsible beings from the gallows, is in reality to allow crime to go unpunished; and that if a man, whether from disease or faulty cerebral conformation, is so constituted that his life and liberty are dangerous to society, society has a right to hang him for its protection; and that therefore it is unimportant to determine the existence or non-existence of such disease or deficiency, as a reason for not ordering him for execution. The first proposition is manifestly absurd. If the man were to be set free because he was not a fit subject for hanging, it might then be justly said, that crime was sheltered from punishment on a plea of false humanity; but the case is totally altered, when the very admission of the insanity necessarily subjects the individual to perpetual confinement, or till confirmed recovery-a process which many crimi

nals dislike even more than hanging. The second proposition," that society may punish a man with death, whether he be insane or not, is obviously wrong-first, because it revolts the moral feelings; and secondly, because, even granting that society has the right to destroy an insane or imbecile member, there is still a most important distinction between destroying a dangerous man because he is a murderer, and destroying him because he has the grievous misfortune to be insane or idiotic. In the one case, a degree of ignominy attaches to the criminal, and to his family, which it would be the most crying injustice to attach to a lunatic and his relatives, merely because, by the visitation of God, he is subjected to a distressing and painful disease. If the idiot and lunatic must die in expiation of their deeds (which we deny), let them be sent to the gallows as dangerous patients, whom society cannot safely permit to live; but let not iniquity be added to misfortune, and morality and religion be outraged, by inflicting upon them and their families the debasing stigma of crime.

But the question of diseased or defective brain being a frequent cause of criminal actions, is important, not only as it involves the fate of the accused, but in reference to the prevention of crime, and the moral progress and safety of society. We have unhappily daily proof before our eyes that the execution of these victims to the laws does not prevent the recurrence of similar atrocities. If the perpetrators are most frequently to be ranked in the class of patients, the fruitlessness of example as a check upon crime is easily understood, for it has never yet been insinuated that the cutting off one man's head will protect another man's brain from attacks of disease. If, on the other hand, the accused are of sound mind, it is then obvious that, in their actions and conduct, they must, like other men of sound mind, be moved by the ordinary impulses of humanity, or, in other words, that they must have strong and palpable motives for their deeds, proportioned in strength to the repulsiveness and horror of the latter. A few accordingly, and but a few, present motives of this kind, and it is in such cases that general sympathy is sometimes roused to save the culprit-simply because every one has so much of all the faculties, that he can fancy himself doing the same act when under strong excitement or strong temptation. Thus, when, under the influence of provocation or excited passion, two individuals quarrel and use deadly violence towards each other, in consequence of which one loses his life, the motive is felt to be so much a part of human nature, and, in some instances, to have so little of the necessarily atrocious in its character, that, by the laws of civilized nations, a milder punishment is decreed against the offender than against the common murderer. In like manner, when a man maddened

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by jealousy and betrayed by the being whom he most loves upon earth, raises his hand against the invader of his peace, the law and public opinion pity while they condemn, and rightly look upon the mental suffering of the offender and the moral stigma consequent upon his conviction and seclusion from society, as the severest visitation which he ought to meet with; and capital punishment is without power, because in such circumstances it is revolting to all our moral feelings, and turns the tide of popular feeling in favour of the criminal, and against those by whom his punishment is awarded.

The characters of Othello and of Macbeth afford striking examples of minds not naturally depraved acting under strong excitement; and the character of the Highland drover in the Chronicles of the Canongate is a not less appropriate instance. Nor is it in romance or in the drama only that such individuals are to be found. David Balfour, who was executed at Dundee, in 1826, for the murder of his wife, is as affecting an instance as any mentioned either in history or in fiction; and the extraor dinary sympathy which he excited in the public mind owed its origin solely to the fact, that that unhappy man was by nature neither more savage, more brutal, nor more unfeeling than his neighbours; but that he was, on the contrary, a man of strong affections, and of a kind, relenting, and forgiving nature; and that it was the outrage committed upon these cherished affections by the brutality of his wife, that distracted his mind and irritated him for the time beyond the power of reason to control, and that led to his untimely fate.

Balfour, it will be recollected, was a man of previously good moral character, by no means deficient in intelligence, and passionately attached to his wife. For several years his feelings were lacerated and his life embittered by the estrangement, hatred, and misconduct of that woman, whom even in her guilt he could not help loving and forgiving; till, on his return home after a considerable absence, when holding out the same proffer of love and friendship which he had never ceased to make, he was insulted and provoked by the most shameful abuse, and ordered, on pain of maltreatment, never to enter the house. Repulsed and reviled not only by his wife but by her family, he went out in a very agitated state of mind, and procured the knife with which, when she was in the act of turning him to the door, he committed the murder; and ran to the jail to give himself up, telling what he had done. Balfour was in fact an Othello in real life and in a lower station, and his situation arrested the attention and sympathy of the public mind in a very extraordinary manner, solely because it was evident that he was wrought upon almost to madness, and was not by nature either destitute of good feeling or utterly depraved. In other words, every one

could feel in his own bosom the power of the spring which had moved him to the rash deed for which he suffered.

It is this palpable existence of an apparent motive that constitutes the chief character of crime, as distinguished from madness. The man who murdered Begbie, the bank-messenger, was evidently tempted by the large sum of money which he believed him to carry; Fauntleroy was also evidently tempted to risk his forgeries by the pressure of his necessities; and Haggart had the same palpable motive in knocking down the Dumfries jailor: but when we come to such cases as those of Delépine, setting fire to every thing within his reach, and lying down on his burning bed; of Schmitt, the parricide, who tried to drown his cousin and murder his sister, and who actually killed his father without external motive of any kind, except the alleged instigation of the devil; of Hipper, who also set fire to the house, attempted the life of his father and sister, and burned the loft containing his own property; of Mounni, who slew one person after another, till himself fired upon and overtaken; of Vatelot, the gendarme, who acted in precisely the same manner, attacking indiscriminately every body that he met, and against whom he could have no grounds of malice; of Trestel, who attempted to poison his father and mother, and a whole dinner-party in their house, without any appreciable motive; of Henrietta Cornier, who cut off the head of a neighbour's child, to whom she was fondly attached; of Papavoine, who murdered, in the wood of Vincennes, two children whom he never saw before; of Robert Deans, who murdered the sister of a girl whom he loved, that she might get to heaven the sooner; when we come to such cases as these, and find no palliating, no human motive, no shadow of reason with which we can sympathize, and see nothing before us but the bloody trace of the murderer's hand, we are apt to shrink back in horror, and, covering our reason with the veil of feeling, to execrate the diabolical insensibility of the miserable criminal. But is not this very removal from the extremest verge of humanity itself a proof, that the mind which directed the deed is not human, and is therefore more deserving of commiseration than of revenge? Is it not a proof of the existence either of morbid derangement of the organ of the mind, or of natural imbecility or uncontrollable thirst of blood?

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All the cases we have cited shew that it is so; and if the public once knew that the organs of the propensities may be dis eased separately from those of the intellect, and that they may possessed in high and vigorous endowment when the intellect is weak, they would seek more anxiously to prevent the commission of such crimes, than to execute the criminals or patients themselves. The propensities do not think or judge, but they furnish constant and vigorous motives to conduct and

action; and if their organs become diseased, it is the conduct and actions that change-not the intellect whose organs remain sound. Hence it happened that Earl Ferrers was rational and sound in his arguments, and acute in his defence, while, his propensities being diseased, his conduct was furious, and his fancy full of conspiracies and plots. By those ignorant of mental philosophy, a man is held to be in sound mind if the anterior lobes of his brain, or organs of intellect, are healthy; while the remaining two-thirds of his brain, the organs of his most powerful mental faculties, may be highly diseased, and consequently his dispositions and character totally changed: and vice versa, if the anterior lobes are diseased, and the intellect is disordered, then he is at once pronounced insane, and regarded as unaccountable, whatever the state of his feelings. But Phrenology will put an end to this, and point to these very unnatural manifestations of the propensities as proofs of disease in their organs, as much as the unnatural state of the intellectual powers is a proof of disease in the anterior region of the brain. In the case of every other organ of the body, an unnatural or perverted state of the function is held to be a proof of the existence of disease; but by a strange anomaly, in that of the brain, the most important of all, perverted function and unnatural action are too often punished as a crime. The lady who, without betraying any aberration of thought, had struggled for three months against the almost overwhelming inclination to murder her infant child, was declared insane, because she had still power to exclaim to have it snatched from her hands; whereas, had she been then alone, and thrown it into the fire, she would in all probability have been condemned to death, on the ground that she had never betrayed any previous symptom of disease-as if this unnatural and horrid propensity without any external inducement, had not been in itself its strongest symptom and most convincing proof.

Very absurd notions are prevalent among the public as to the condition and conduct of the insane, and it is important that they should be corrected. The accomplishment of a crime by a person previously regarded as sane, is supposed to exclude the possibility of the existence of insanity; whereas medical men well know, and some of them have eloquently described, the long-continued efforts which a man, who feels his mind to be suffering, silently makes, first to resist the aberrations to which he is inclined, and afterwards to prevent them attracting the notice of others, till at last, from the accidental presence of some exciting cause, self-control becomes impossible, and an explosion takes place, which, to the bystanders, is the first evidence of his altered state. If Self-Esteem or Cautiousness