served, and except for his delirious ideas, he reasons soundly. It sometimes happens that the murderous act is the first delirious manifestation which attracts attention upon the subject. Up to then he was not known to be a inaniac. He dissimulated his condition and was pursuing his daily occupations. But in studying him one recognizes quickly that mania is already of ancient date in him; his relatives and friends perceive for a long time his preoccupations and his strange ideas. Here it must be noticed that with the mania of persecution of Lasegue the homicidal tendencies do not show themselves in the beginning of the affection. They appear slowly, like logical deductions of delirious conceptions pondered during a long time.

There are some maniacs with delusions of persecution who have stronger propensities to murder than others. Perhaps this is the effect of their more naturally violent dispositions. Whilst a great number of these patients are satisfied with insulting, threatening or striking their imaginary enemies, others have only the idea of killing them. I have in my ward a patient of this kind; he is now aged and a little demented; his ideas of persecution have lost much of their ancient intensity. This patient has formerly killed seven persons whilst under the influence of his delitium of persecuton. Above all, he hated clergymen, and accused them of persecuting him. Even to-day, when one recalls his mania to him or speaks of priests the delirium, vague enough and quite blotted out, comes back for a moment clear and violent, his face expresses wrath, and he utters threatenings of death.

To sum up, in manias of persecution the homicide is relatively frequent; it never manifests itself in the beginning of the affection, but in a quite advanced period, and when mania is clearly systematized. In a word it is the logical consequence of delirious conceptions.

Many of these persecutes have killed under the influence

of their malady some prominent person, and have thus acquired sad celebrity. Many regicides were but patients of this kind; Raveillac was very likely one of them. This is at least what seems to result from documents lately gathered and commented upon by a learned physician.

In regard to the persecutes of the Falret type, who have no hallucinations, they are intellectually degenerated; this does not imply that they are forcibly cretins or imbeciles; it means simply that they have lost their mental equilibrium. We meet homicides also among them, but less often than among the Lasegue types.

These subjects are naturally envious, suspicious and proud. They reach mania progressively, and so as to say, in consequence of the excessive exaggeration of the defects of their character. At a given moment they interpret all that happened to them in a sense of persecution. Mania is then established. From persecuted they begin soon to become persecutors themselves. They select the person who, according to themselves, has done them the greatest injury or the most evil; this selection is often guided by some real incident whose bearings they misconstrue. Of such a person they make the object of their hatred, leaving him neither peace nor rest. Patients, who reach the point of having recourse to homicide are before all progressives. They denounce, insult and calumniate; they invent false accusations very cleverly combined or they sometimes skillfully direct those kinds of enterprises commonly known as blackmailing. A remarkable type of this kind of maniac is furnished by the famous Sandon, who under the Empire, succeeded in interesting in his fate almost the universal press, and whom they still mention to-day as a victim of the law of 1838.

As I have already said, these persecuting maniacs go sometimes so far as to murder. It is necessary, however, to note that with them as well as with the maniacs of the Lasegue type, the tendency to homicide appears only in the advanced phases of the affection.

The preceding patients, the persecutes, do not commit murder under a sudden impulse, but under the influence of a reasoning logic. With other homicidal maniacs the impulse exists in the sense, which is habitually given to this term, that is to say, that with them the tendency to kill is not premeditated, but that the idea of taking life imposes itself to their mind either under the influence of passion or spontaneously without any other reason but a special pathological condition of the functioning of the brain. It may happen that impulse and act may be unconscious, and this last accomplished, the perpetrator may not even keep the least remembrance of it. Such are, among others, the murders committed by certain epileptics.

After the persecutes, very likely the epileptics, the imbeciles and the half-idiots are those who furnish the greatest number of maniacal homicides.

Epileptics become homicidal in two different conditions. At first they may have delirious accesses of the maniacal form, and of an extreme intensity, during the course of which they are impelled to murder. These accesses burst forth almost suddenly, but they are transitory and soon pass.

An essential character is that they are unconscious. This is not the place to investigate the relations which exist between these accesses of furious folly (epileptics' fury) and the epileptic neurose itself. We should confine ourselves strictly within the domain of the clinic, and we will not undertake any problem of a speculative order, our aim being only to sketch a short medico-legal study. Whether these transitory maniacal accesses of fury are attacks of epilepsy or not, whether they are simply motor or purely intellectual, it matters little in practice. What is certain is that they are observed either before or more frequently after the convulsive attack, and sometimes within their intervals.

Now during these accesses of maniacal fury, epileptics, only to often, commit murder, and then they kill

unconsciously, without any reason, the first person within their reach.

Sometimes they accomplish their murder in cold blood, without noise; and sometimes (this is the most frequent) they proceed with such fury and persistence that they still continue to strike though their victim has already expired. Some epileptics have thus successively killed two, three or even four persons, whom they did not know. The bodies of such victims, covered with gore and wounds and disfigured, have something characteristic about them. At the sight of such mutilated bodies, Legrand Du Saulle said: "Epilepsy has marked them with its own seal." These epileptics once calmed, and returned to themselves, never preserve the remembrance of the deeds they have just committed. In a few words, here is the relation of a typical observation of homicidal mania with an epileptic.

N. N., 40 years old, entered the asylum of Cadillac in 1886, with the diagnosis: "Mania," without any other information upon his antecedents.

On his entering the patient seems to have reached the final period of an access of mania; his ideas were confused, no delirious conceptions predominating. He recovers completely and is soon calm and rational. He is sent to work, that is, he is employed at farm work, with other quiet patients. Sometime after, whilst at work, he shows himself unusually excited and angry, he threatens his fellow patients. They take him back into the ward; arrived in the yard, he becomes entirely furious, and drawing an old knife from his pocket, which he must have found in the garden, he, howling, precipitates himself upon the patient nearest to him. He strikes him with such violence that though the knife is dull, it penetrates the heart: death is instantaneous. This homicide accomplished, he turns his fury against other patients, who fly from him, and wounds another one of them. At last, the waiters succeed in disarming and mastering him, but not without injury to one of them, who was grievously wounded during the fight.

Isolated in his cell N. N. calms rapidly. The day after the access of his fury, he does not retain even the least remembrance of it. He names similar accesses, but without such horrible consequences, which took place at irregular intervals; four were observed during six months. At last, one day N. N. had a violent attack of convulsive epilepsy; since this the convulsive attacks renewed themselves from time to time, and the maniacal accesses occurred less and less frequently.

In the sequence of homicides accomplished during accesses of epileptic manic, it may also be opportune to relate those committed by the so-called comitial epileptics, committed rather under the influence of passion, than under the mania called epileptic.

The habitual mental state of epileptics is well-known. We know at first that in general with these patients the intellectual faculties weaken progressively, and that in time a true dementia, epileptic dementia succeeds in establishing itself. But moreover, the character of the so-called comitial epileptics modifies itself little by little, progressively under the influence of convulsive attacks, and of vertigoes, which repeat themselves ceaselessly. The patients become irritables, fierce and wicked. This does not hinder, in all circumstances, an affection of great sensitiveness.

Contradiction exasperates them. On account of trifles they exhibit an extreme fierceness; though they afterwards show an exaggerated repentance for it. With them, the act follows the threat immediately; acting and threatening are simultaneous. They are impulsives. It is evident that they do not possess sufficient power to counteract their instinctive and passionate tendencies. There exists a real lesion of will.

Now it sometimes happens that their violence carries them as far as homicide. In these cases there exists no properly called lunacy. However, the functioning of the brain is not normal; it is pathologic. In similar circumstances, the physicians called to examine the mental