fast as she could, to get help in time; she
did not let her friends know of her intention,
for she had asked them to bring her, and
they were unwilling to do so." A little
medicine and repose tranquillised the rising
nervous agitation. In two or three days she
returned home to her friends, and has
remained with them ever since. This instant
hurry to secure relief was a half mad act,
founded on the soundest judgment. At the
very first symptom of disease in the mind
let remedy be sought. Let there be no avoidable
postponement of the search for efficient
help,—not even for an hour.

Moreover, if the sufferer be in want
through poverty, or through the not uncommon
error that induces some people to starve
the body—keep it under—for advantage of
the mind, let there be immediate recognition
of the truth, that there is often better mental
food in a beafsteak than in a book—that the
mind partakes of the body's health or
sickness—that whatever weakens one weakens
the other, whatever strengthens one
strengthens the other. The main root of
insanity is defect of nutrition, often a
transmitted weakness, often a depression caused
by personal privation; it never is a strength
of fury added to good health: its wildest
paroxysm is, so to speak, the agony of a
mind upon which its house of the flesh falls
torturing and crushing, after its foundations
have been loosened. Insanity is not the
immaterial disease of an immaterial essence,
but the perverted action of the mind caused
by a defect in its instrument. Whatever
helps to put the body into good physical
condition does something towards the repair
of the defective instrument.

Here it is worth while to observe, that, in
daily life, without the limits of a positive
disease, there are few things more obviously
injurious to the mind's health than crotchets
of unreasonable abstinence. It is not in body
only that we are to-day pretty well,
to-morrow a little poorly, next day full of
vigour; changes of mental health are greater
and more frequent, and to the person in
whom they take place more obvious; yet we
habitually refer them to the body. Depression,
irritability, and a dozen other shifting
states of mind, we speak of as bodily
disorders, and with reason. Thus it is that
men's characters come to depend, in no small
degree, upon their breakfasts and their dinners.
Has any reader of these pages ever
known a man or woman who, without proper
compensation to the system, chose to play
vegetarian or total abstainer, who has not
shown also weaknesses of character, and a
crotchettiness upon sundry points
irreconcileable with the belief that they enjoy a true
soundness of mental health? On what
morbid impressions do we find young ladies
feasting their minds when they have once
abandoned the allegiance due to bread and
mutton! The lean men of old, who went out
into the desert to starve themselves into
sanctity, would have been infinitely holier
had they been healthy labourers in tlieir
Great Master's vineyard, applying sound
minds to the love and comfort of their neighbours.
There was use then, no doubt, in
their extravagant antagonism of a life of
heavenly contemplation with the turmoil of
a world wholly immersed in rude physical
struggle. We do not discuss the state of
society that begot and supported a delusion,
and gave it, as it gave at other times to yet
more conspicuous delusions, its place in the
great system of human history. Those
half-starved men, with their mental disease, and
its attendant visions and delusions, must
have been in a very large number of cases
incurable lunatics.

Drunkenness begets insanity not by excitement.
It is the stage of reaction and
depression to which reason succumbs. The
drunkard also turns from his meat,, and by
the substitution of a drink that contains few
elements of nourishment for a great part of
the solid sustenance by which alone the body
can be nourished, he secures a double risk.
He really starves his body while he also
spoils his powers of digestion; thus secures,
in an extreme form, the defect of nutrition
that throws open the gate by which madness
usually enters. At the same time, he struggles
to pull in his madness through the gate
so opened by taking that which continually
forces his mind into fits of unhealthy depression.

Thus, an excess of intoxicating drink is
maddening; but the madness of the excited
drunkard is not the direct begetter of
insanity. That comes of the next consequent
depression working on a mind in an
ill-nourished body. It is so also with opium-eating.
When the Lincolnshire labourers
worked in their fens, before the drainage of
the country, they (not being of one mind
with the proverb, that "an ague in spring is
physic for a king") gladly fastened upon
opium-eating as a safeguard against ague.
The fens are now drained, but the habit of
eating opium remains; and to the last report
of the Lincolnshire Lunatic Asylum, Dr.
Palmer contributes a very emphatic expression
of the prevalence and danger of this
secret vice, which sends him many a patient
melancholy mad from among the peasant
population of his county.

There are still thousands among the ignorant,
who hold concerning insanity opinions
little in advance of those of the day when
Luther said, "Idiots are men in whom devils
have established themselves; and all the
physicians who heal those infirmities as if they
proceeded from natural causes are ignorant
blockheads, who know nothing about the
powers of the demon. Eight years ago I
myself saw and touched at Dessau a child
of this sort, which had no human parents,
but had proceeded from the devil." The