object as what had been once entertained by Flora Maclean namely, to sink in some place where his poverty and misery would bring no discredit upon his name or kindred. As he afterwards confessed, he was not without money, but it was only enough to furnish the means of putting him under the earth without assistance from strangers-an object he cherished so warmly, that no extremity of want could have induced him to break in upon the little sum. His course was eastward into Perthshire, and for some days he wandered regardlessly on, receiving here and there food and lodging from people nearly as poor as himself. At length he was overtaken in Glendochart by a very severe snowstorm, with which he struggled for some hours till he was nearly exhausted. I once,' he thought to himself, 'saved a fellow-creature from dying in the snow: it now seems likely that such will be my own fate.' He was just about to give up all hope, when he arrived at the gate of a respectable mansion, and on applying for admission, was kindly received into the kitchen, and solaced with some warm soup by the cook. While he sat by the fire pondering on fancies all of which were bitter, a lady came down to give some household orders, attended by a girl of four or five years, who began to play about the kitchen. The lady, seeing the old man's eye fixed upon the child, asked if he had ever seen her before.

Ay,' said Mactaggart in his native language, ‘I have seen both you and her before: it was on a white day that I saw you first, but, alas! the blackest day to me that I ever knew.

The lady was Flora Maclean, or, more properly, Mrs Stewart. Overcome by her feelings she screamed, and threw herself upon the bosom of her kind protector, where she remained for several minutes in a passion of tears. The noise brought her husband down to see what was the matter, and she speedily explained to him that this old man was he who had saved her own life and that of her child,

John Mactaggart spent all the remainder of his life in this happy mansion, to which he had been led in the very extraordinary manner we have described.

MONOMANIACS.

It is a

MONOMANIA is a curious form of mental disease. species of derangement, in which one idea is always uppermost in the mind; and to that all must give way. A familiar and simple form of the delusion is ordinarily known as hypochondria, in which, through some kind of nervous derangement, a person imagines himself to be afflicted with an infirmity for which there is no substantial grounds. He thinks he has a heart- disease, and will be cut off suddenly one of these days; or he knows he has consumption, and cannot last long; or he is alarmed at every little pain, and is sure it means something very bad. But these are simple manifestations. The genuine hypochondriac, who has nursed his delusion till it becomes a settled monomania, believes the drollest things of himself. He thinks he is no longer a human being, and has become a teapot; or he is a hen, and wishes to sit on eggs to hatch chickens. In short, there is no end to such delusions. We once knew a man, sound in other respects, who believed that his legs were made of glass, and would break with the least touch. But this was nothing to what is related of a monomaniac by Pinel, a celebrated French physician; and an account of which appeared in the Analyst, a quarterly journal of science and literature, some years ago.

"This monomaniac was a Parisian watchmaker, who lived at the period of the Revolution of 1789. He was infatuated with the chimera of the Perpetual Motion, and to effect the discovery of this, he set to work with indefatigable ardour. From unremitting attention to the object of his enthusiasm, coinciding with the influence of revolu

tionary disturbances, his imagination was greatly heated, his sleep was interrupted, and at length a complete derangement took place. His case was marked by a most whimsical illusion of the imagination: he fancied that he had lost his head upon the scaffold; that it had been thrown promiscuously among the heads of many other victims; that the judges, having repented of their cruel sentence, had ordered these heads to be restored to their respective owners, and placed upon their respective shoulders; but that, in consequence of an unhappy mistake, the gentlemen who had the management of that business had placed upon his shoulders the head of one of his unhappy companions. The idea of this whimsical change of his head occupied his thoughts night and day, which determined his friends to send him to the asylum. Nothing could exceed the extravagant flowings of his heated brain: he sang, he cried, or danced incessantly; and as there appeared no propensity to commit acts of violence or disturbance, he was allowed to go about the hospital without control, in order to expend, by evaporation, the effervescence of his spirits. "Look at these teeth!" he cried; "mine were exceedingly handsome; these are rotten and decayed. My mouth was sound and healthy; this is foul and diseased. What difference between this hair and that of my own head!"

The idea of perpetual motion frequently recurred to him in the midst of his wanderings, and he chalked on all the doors or windows as he passed the various designs by which his wondrous piece of mechanism was to be constructed. The method best calculated to cure so whimsical an illusion appeared to be that of encouraging his prosecution of it to satiety. His friends were accordingly requested to send him his tools, with materials to work upon, and other requisites-such as plates of copper, steel, and watch-wheels. His zeal was now redoubled; his whole attention was rivetted upon his favourite pursuit; he forgot his meals, and after about a month's labour, which he sustained with a constancy that deserved a better success, our artist began to think that he had followed

a false route. He broke into a thousand fragments the piece of machinery which he had fabricated with so much toil, and thought, and labour, entered upon the construction of another upon a new plan, and laboured with equal pertinacity for another fortnight. The various parts being completed, he brought them together; he fancied that he saw a perfect harmony amongst them. The whole was now finally adjusted; his anxiety was indescribable— motion succeeded; it continued for some time, and he supposed it capable of continuing for ever. He was elevated to the highest pitch of enjoyment and triumph, and ran like lightning into the interior of the hospital, crying out like another Archimedes: "At length I have solved this famous problem, which has puzzled so many men celebrated for their wisdom and talents!" Grievous to state, he was disconcerted in the midst of his triumph. The wheels stopped! the "perpetual motion" ceased! His intoxication of joy was succeeded by disappointment and confusion; though, to avoid a humiliating and mortifying confession, he declared that he could easily remove the impediment; but, tired of that kind of employment, he was determined, for the future, to devote his attention solely to his business.

"There still remained another imaginary impression to be counteracted—that of the exchange of his head, which unceasingly occurred to him. A keen and unanswerable stroke of pleasantry seemed best adapted to correct this fantastic whim. Another convalescent, of a gay and facetious humour, instructed in the part he should play in this comedy, adroitly turned the conversation to the subject of the famous miracle of St Denis, in which it will be recollected that the holy man, after decapitation, walked away with his head under his arm, which he kissed and condoled with for its misfortune. Our mechanician strongly maintained the possibility of the fact, and sought to confirm it by an appeal to his own case. The other set up a loud laugh, and replied with a tone of the keenest ridicule: "Madman as thou art, how could St Denis kiss his own head? Was it with his heels?" This

equally unexpected and unanswerable retort forcibly struck the maniac. He retired confused amid the peals of laughter which were provoked at his expense, and never afterwards mentioned the exchange of his head.

This is a very instructive case, inasmuch as it illustrates, in the clearest point of view, the moral treatment of the insane. It shews us the kind of mental remedies which are likely to be successful in the cure of disordered intellect. This disease was purely of the imagination, and the causes which produced it did not lie very deep, neither were they such as, under proper management, were likely to produce any permanent alienation of mind. An intense application to the more speculative parts of his trade had fixed his imagination upon the discovery of perpetual motion: mingling with this, when his judgment was half dethroned, came the idea of losing his own head, and getting a wrong one. And at a time when heads were falling indiscriminately around him, this second freak of the imagination, acting as a kind of interlude or by-play to the first, was one of the most natural that could be supposed. The ideas which produced this man's insanity were rather of a whimsical cast; springing from a mind of no great power, over which none of the passions appear to have exercised any marked or predominant sway?'

To these counsels we would add, that hypochondria and monomania are pretty much a result of leading a moping and retired life, in which the mind communes too much with itself. The preventive is out-door exercise, temperance, and a habit of mingling in the everyday world; for without this there can be no robustness of ideas. Nothing brushes away the cobwebs of the mind so effectually as the cheerful intercourse of society.