of the kind in order to be hanged. acquitted on the ground of insanity! He was What distinction can possibly be made by physician or jurist between these last two cases; or how is it possible to lay down rules for the future guidance of medical witnesses, under such capricious decisions? The acquittal of Touchett may have been perfectly right, but then the execution of Lawrence was a public wrong. Many such counterparts might be instanced; but there is, I think, sufficient to prove that there is both uncertainty and injustice in the operation of our criminal law; either some individuals are most improperly acquitted, on the ground of insanity, or others are most unjustly executed. Opposing, then, the legal test, on the score of its inefficiency, inadequacy, and uncertain application, the next consideration should evidently be, if possible, to provide a better. Let us array before us, to the best of our ability, all the difficulties of the subject, and endeavour honestly to give to each its due weight and importance; this course, if allowed by our capacity to be followed out to its legitimate termination, must lead to what is indisputably the most to be coveted, the naked truth of the matter. "None sends his arrow to the mark in view, 19 CHAPTER II. ON MIND, SOUND AND UNSOUND. In the words of an elegant writer, "The mind is that part of our being which thinks and wills, remembers and reasons; we know nothing of it except from these functions. By means of the corporeal senses, it holds intercourse with the things of the external world, and receives impressions from them. But of this connexion also we know nothing but the facts; when we attempt to speculate upon its nature and cause, we wander at once from the path of philosophical inquiry, into conjectures which are as far out of the proper sphere, as they are beyond the reach of the human faculties." Without, therefore, attempting to enter upon the questionable ground of the materiality or immateriality of the mind, a digression which would be out of place in a treatise of this nature, we shall assume a position. that will not be disputed,-viz., that the brain is an organ of complex arrangement, adapted for the transmission of the fiats of this power which we call mind. We notice that certain portions of its struc ture appear to be set apart for the regulation of the special senses, for it is found that lesions either from injury or disease affecting such parts are attended by partial impairment, or total loss of the sense itself; the morbid condition of the brain substance, modifying or preventing the transmission of that impulse which is needed to put in action the wondrous mechanism for communication with the objects of the external world. Something of the same nature is observable with respect to the operations of the mind, though from the infant state of our phrenological knowledge we are as yet unable to associate the effect with its cause. This is, perhaps, trenching upon dangerous ground; and I am therefore wishful to be understood that, in employing the term phrenological, it is not with reference to the so-called system of mapping out the surface of the head into compartments, and giving local habitation to the qualities of the mind and such like, which seems crude and unscientific, and injurious to the best interests of science as calculated to divert the consideration of the truth-seeker from a subject which he finds so overwhelmed with absurdity. But few reflecting observers of mind will hesitate to admit the existence of a solid principle beneath this tinsel superstructure; comparative anatomy bears silent testimony to the varied degrees of intelligence of the animal, as relative to the amount and intricacy of the convolutions of the brain; though even on this head, some facts yet require explanation, which are possibly only apparent objections to the conclusion. If we ponder upon the evidence presented by the cocoa-nut shaped skull of the idiot, the receding forehead and capacious occiput of the unintellectual and ferocious savage, and the well-developed cranium of the intelligent Caucasian, the inference would appear to be, that inquiries pursued in a correct inductive spirit (and not with a mind predisposed to receive as facts principles only partially proven, or prepared to accommodate facts to theory, instead of theory to facts), may yet succeed in placing a sound phrenology on a level with the great scientific truths of the day. To return to our subject, we notice then the faulty operation of the mind, sometimes as the companion of a diseased state of the brain; oftentimes we are unable to trace any connexion; so that, as in other organs of the body, we recognise in the brain those derangements of function, attended by sensible structural alteration under the term organic change; and where we find derangement of function not associated with any appreciable change of structure, this we call functional. The external manifestation, however, is in either case the same; and the only import of the distinction is, with reference to the curability or incurability of the malady. This, then, at present, is the real amount of our knowledge of the channel through which mind passes, meagre and unsatisfactory though it be, and we pass on to view the operations of the mind, results we can see and appreciate, of an agency we can neither see nor comprehend. We express these primary powers by the following denominations,viz., sensation, association, memory, imagination, judgment, and will. In the healthy mind, we see that impressions are received through the medium of the senses, and registered as ideas; that, by the process of association, we are so enabled to arrange two or more facts or conceptions, that at an afterperiod the remembrance of the one recalls the others, in their due order and relation. In memory we trace a provision for the retention of facts or events; imagination "bodies forth the form of things unknown;" by it we can wave the enchanter's wand, as it were, over our ideas, and with Circean power, transform them into pictures, mythic and unreal. The mental exercise by which we compare facts with each other and mental impressions with external things," constitutes the sedate, steadying power we call judgment, which should decide our mode of action; whilst the will determines the act itself. The well-regulated mind (par excellence) shows the perfect working of these powers, each in due dependance upon the other, but all submissive to the sway of reason; a combination of forces, by this means, attuned to the production of harmonious action. Slight reflection will convince of the great range that must of necessity be allowed for even |