idea, that homicide takes place, but it is always accomplished with the same conditions of anguish, and with the same spontaneity, which keeps for it the character of a true reflex action.

Besides true malancholy we observe with degenerates still other manifold delirious conditions, more or less partial and more or less systematized. Irregular in their evolution, these psychopathic states sometimes succeed a fit of ordinary melancholy, sometimes a fit of mania, and finally they take place together with their definitive char

acters.

Many of them reattach themselves to the paranoia of the Germans, but in France they are all classified under the appellation of melancholic delirium. These kinds of delirium sometimes complicate themselves, at a given moment, with homicides, which are always perpetrated with the precited characteristic signs. Among these kinds of melancholic madness, it may be fitting to mention particularly the mystic delirium, in which homicide may be the result of delirious conceptions deduced one from the other.

Lastly, certain imbeciles and semi-idiots fall very easily into delirium. The least cause is for them the occasion of hallucinations and of mad conceptions. These insane attacks, ordinarily transitory (to which allusion has already been made while speaking of homicides with imbeciles), are also complicated with divers impulses, among which is the impulse to homicide.

To resume, all homicides perpetrated by lunatics intellectually degenerated in the course of real psychopathic states have invariably characters, which lend to them a special common aspect; this allows in legal medicine to reunite them, and thus to form a well-determined class. It remains to signalize a last category of very rare and very remarkable facts. Some intellectually degenerated individuals, not mentally debilitated, that is to say of normal intelligence, are tormented by homicidal obsessions of the most violent kind. They have neither hallucinations

nor true delirious conceptions, but they are persecute by an irresistible desire, an imperious desire, to kill. Generally they resist as long as they are able, because they have the exact notion of the grievousness of the crime which they feel themselves dragged to commit. The object of their obsession is often a person whom they love, as a child or parent, a relation, etc. If the circumstances do not oppose it, in spite of the horror with which the action inspires them, they end by succumbing to it.

To this obsession, which is preceded by intermittent attacks, or which, is at least paroxysmal, there always combines to itself anguish. These characters, and others besides, which it would be idle to mention, bring this phenomena of homicidal obsession in relationship with other morbid phenomena equally as strange; for example, the obsession to suicide and certain perversions of the sexual senses, nécrophilic for instance.

They have specially studied these strange phenomena a great deal in later times, and it has been recognized that they are united together with a common tie of relationship. They constitute one of the superior limits of intellectual degeneracy, and the origin is almost always found in morbid heredity. However, I believe that though in those cases where heredity is the rule, degeneracy may also be acquired.

I do not think it is necessary to mention the homicide committed by subjects designated by the name of moral lunatics. Moral madness, in spite of the name given to it, is, according to my views, a thing foreign to madness. In fact, we must exclude from it (from this moral madness), the patients of whom we have just treated, and who are under the influence of obsession or impulsion, two phenomena of a strictly pathologic order. What are then the subjects who remain within the domain of this moral madness, which they want to attach to lunacy? Some individuals void of any notion of honor or of honesty, with whom human life counts for little,

whose actions are ruled only by passion, by instinct and by selfishness, who often glory in their misdeeds, and who commit evil for evil's sake. Well, such individuals are not mad, they are criminals. They belong to the class of born criminals of Lombroso. This scholar has himself proved the identity which exists between his born criminal and the morally mad of certain authors.

Amongst the reasons which have led to assimilate the morally mad with the lunatic, some are without great value, these are those which are established upon the ancient metaphysical conception of free will; others are of scientific order. Thus it has been observed that the moral lunatics possessed much more often than the normal subjects, physical and psychical signs of degenerасу. It has also been noted with them heredity is frequent, neuropathic heredity, as well as hereditary to crime. It must be recognized that these two conditions approach them really with the insane, but they are not sufficient to identify them with the others. They indicate only that the morally mad and the true lunatics have a common origin. This origin is degeneracy, which ends either in madness or crime. We have therefore nothing to do with homicide committed in moral madness; this would be leaving the domain of medicine.

The moral madman is not a lunatic, he is a born criminal, consequently whether he be considered responsible for his acts or not, enters not into our province; besides, responsibility as the moralists understand it, is a question connected with free will and the nuisance alone, as has already been remarked is susceptible of being studied, measured, and finally foreseen. In ending this summary exposition of circumstances and of different conditions in which we may observe homicide during the career of mania, I shall call attention to a point which is not without importance.

We have seen that certain patients who are not primitively degenerated, but who have reached an advanced period of brain affection, proceed sometimes when they

have become homicides in the manner of veritable intellectual degenerates. Thus old alcoholics, when they kill do not act under the influence of delirium, but under the influence of fury. Also the old epileptics when they become homicides, outside of their accesses of epileptic mania, act in consequence of an impulse, of a sort of reflex character; with them the instinctive centers are sufficiently inhibited by the anterior centers. It is precisely thus that things happen with the delirious degenerates. It seems therefore that their brain, primitively healthy, has become unbalanced, inferior through modifications (brought on in time) in its functioning by the affection of which it is the seat. This observation has already been made by Billod.

PART II.

In legal medicine it is not sufficient to affirm that a given murder has been committed under the influence of madness; it is moreover necessary to show that the homicide in question is a clinical phenomenon, constituting part of a known morbid state, which has been well studied and characterized, and that it has nothing unusual from a mental pathological point of view. It is also necessary to establish its genesis if possible, that is to say, the psychological process which has caused its manifestation, must be followed. I have tried in the preceding summary to indicate the principal pathological circumstances in which it is so to say, normal, to establish the tendency to homicide. If then in practice, homicide is met with outside of the nosological entities which I have signalized, we must consider the case as abnormal; and search if there are other similar cases in science. But the most often, in studying more attentively the subject, one will recognize that the supposed abnormality does not exist, and that the case which seems exceptional re-enters into the common rule. Here is a proof furnished by the observation of a maniac named:

man

A., author of four successive murders. The seemed at first sight to belong to no psychopathic class in which homicide is observed either as a symptom or as a complication, but after a more attentive examination, and with a knowledge of his antecedents, it became easy to establish that he was in the same condition of disequilibration as the intellectually degenerated, and that in sum, his case had nothing abnormal. He was a cerebral as Lasegue used to call this class of patients. In other terms he was attacked with non-hereditary intellectual degeneracy, acquired in the adult stage of life. I was charged by the Judge of Instruction of Chateaudun to examine him, and to report upon his mental condition. This is the slightly modified report that I transcribe here.

I think that I should at first expose the antecedents of A., then the murders committed by him, with the peculiarities which have accompanied them, insisting only upon the points which may furnish indications in regard to the study of his mental condition. After this I will describe the symptoms presented by A., since he is under observation at the asylum, finally the difficult elements of the problem of psychiatry to be solved, being thus methodically classified; I will then discuss their value, causing the importance of several among them to stand forth and establish a diagnosis based upon their grouping, which will constitute the conclusion of my report.

A. is a man thirty-two years of age, of rather short stature, but strongly muscled, and of exceptional strength. He does not present the least sign of physical degeneracy. According to the most careful research, he belongs to a family in which neither insanity nor epilepsy have ever been observed. His father and his mother died quite young, of typhoid fever; the relations who remain to him, uncles, brothers, etc., are in good health, and are not remarkable for any originality of character or any intellectual blemish. He has four children of tender age,