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D'Anville for the ancient Berenice, that our travellers had little doubt of having discovered the remains of this once flourishing emporium. They were confirmed in this opinion by tracing afterwards several ruins of what might have been the stations of the caravans, in their passage to and from Coptos.

In our notice of Mr. Belzoni's journey into the El Wah, we must be very brief; indeed we have already mentioned the only two points of any interest in this quarter, the ruins of the temple of Jupiter Ammon, and the fountain of the Sun, both of which he conceives he found in this Oasis :-so very jealous, however, were the natives, that he was only allowed to approach the temple within a certain distance, and consequently was unable to examine any part of it. The source of the fountain of the Sun he was permitted to visit. It is an overflowing well about eight feet square at the top, and above sixty deep, (how he ascertained this we are not told ;) it is situated not far from the temple, in the centre of a beautiful wood of palms and other trees. Mr. Belzoni tells us, that he visited this well at noon, evening, midnight, and morning. He had no thermometer; but he supposes a proportionate scale of the temperature of the water, or rather of his feelings, at the several periods of the day; thus, he says, if we were to suppose the water to have been at 60° in the evening, it might be at 100° at midnight, and in the morning at about 80°; but when I returned at noon, it appeared quite cold, and might be calculated, in proportion to the other, at 40°.' We are not satisfied with these vague calculations, and if the apparent change in the temperature be occasioned by the mere change in that of the atmosphere, while the water of this deep and shaded well remains the same, as we suggested in a former article, Mr. Belzoni's scale exhibits, we are quite certain, far too violent changes. If the account of this fountain, as given by Herodotus, were correct, the explanation of the change of temperature, by the different action of the air and water on the human body, would not hold good, for he makes it cold both at noon and midnight: but Herodotus was never in the Oasis himself; and having nothing to guide his judgment in recording this supposed miracle, might easily have misunderstood his informer.

In taking leave of this work, it is but justice to Mr. Belzoni to observe, that we have limited our notices to a few only of the more important parts of his operations and discoveries; and pur

posely

posely avoided entering upon any detailed account of his intercourse and adventures with the various natives of Egypt, Nubia, and Lybia, and of the manners, characters, and condition of those tribes with whom he had to deal. These are subjects, however, which will be found both amusing and interesting to the general reader.

ART. VII.-An Inquiry into certain Errors relative to Insanity; and their Consequences, physical, moral and civil. By George Man Burrows, M.D. F.L.S. 8vo. pp. 320. London.

WE

E have more than once intimated our design to abstain from discussing topics purely professional, under the feeling that they can only be interesting to a comparatively small number of our readers; and are therefore more properly the province of journals exclusively devoted to technical science. The subject now before us, however, is one of very general concern; for it is of the highest moment that the physical, moral and civil' consequences of errors relative to mental sickness be made matter of public canvas and scrutiny. In the course of the investigation, on which we are about to enter, it will indeed be seen that much good has already been effected by inquiries directed to these important points, and that the foundation has been laid, upon which hopes may be built of still more extended improvement.

Of the various spectacles of misery which the great drama of life continually presents, that of madness excites the most painful combination of feelings;' and one reason of the especial horror with which mental alienation is contemplated, may be its want of obvious source in the physical organization. Delirium, as a consequence of fever, is a temporary mania, and the manifestations of this disordered condition are sometimes exceedingly painful to the beholder; but in this case there seems to be something to which the hallucination can be referred; and we expect its disappearance with the cessation of its exciting cause. But genuine madness-that is, madness not dependent upon any bodily change which immediately meets the eye-we are naturally disposed to consider essentially different from mere physical derangement, and therefore to put a kind of metaphysical or moral construction upon the whole series of melancholy concatenations by which it is characterized.

Another distressing source of perplexity connected with the contemplation of maniacal wanderings is constituted by the difficulty often experienced in drawing the line of demarcation between voluntary or responsible, and involuntary or insane acts; ' in ascertaining how much appears to arise from actual disease, and what part should be attributed to passions associated with,

but

but not dependent upon, the morbid affection."* In a former article we endeavoured to prove false perception to be the great key stone of the insane state, but admitted the difficulty of predicating the precise point at which correct perception ceases and invincible impulse commences-or of knowing what to set down to the score of mere temper and passion, and what to place to the account of positive or diseased obliquity of the understanding and will.

That much error therefore should have entwined itself with speculations on the essence of insanity cannot excite surprise, and in the early periods of philosophizing, it was to be expected that this, one of the most awful of divine dispensations, should have been felt and considered as something not only beyond the reach of physical explication, but altogether out of the compass of physical agency. We find, in fact, that more or less of this feeling influenced the ancients in their notions of all complaints which directly implicate the sentient part of the frame: hence the term sußpovтnto was applied even to apoplectics-a term which supposes particular and supernatural instrumentality. Modern science has done much towards correcting these superstitious notions. We do not, indeed, in the present day, even deem those reasonings sound which take into their account the designs of nature in order to solve the problem of diseased production; and when Cullen talks of the vires medicatrices, and John Hunter expatiates on the life of the blood' and the stimulus of necessity,' we venture to smile at the attempts of these great authorities to substitute nominal for real essences, and clothe the principia of science in the garb of poetry.

But in canvassing the peculiarities of physico-mental manifestations, there is some danger of running into opposite extremes; and the speculations of several recent writers on the laws of animal and intellectual being, afford palpable evidence of a misapplication of physical reasoning; for while organic conditions have been too much lost sight of by those who, from mistaking the very object of their inquiries, have confounded the ideas of final and efficient causes; other speculators (and they are but the followers of ancient sceptics) have fallen into the equally absurd and dangerous error of conferring an inherent and unlimited power upon organic construction; and, by placing out of their account of causation every thing beyond the material fabric, of reducing the soul of man to a kind of tertium quid, a principle of combination resulting from the juxtaposition of attracting particles. This philosophy, indeed, would extend to the demolition of all the

* Haslam.

land

land-marks which stand between virtue and vice, and teach us to regard crime and disease as different only in name; it would call upon us to commiserate moral ill precisely as we do mental alienation, since criminality in all its extent resolves itself into organic necessity, and the hand of the assassin is urged by the same impulse as that which directs the wild beast of the forest in springing upon its prey, or the foaming cataract in rushing down the mountain-steep!

This mode of transferring physical into moral considerations is primâ facie so absurd, so incompatible with every idea of responsibility in man, and has in truth been so often refuted, that we can only be excused for adverting to it in this place, from a consciousness of the tendency just hinted at to extremes, and from an apprehension that, while discarding the subtilties of the schoolmen, on the subject of disordered intellect, we may insensibly slide into something worse, both in itself and its influence upon our minds, than even bad metaphysics. To say that insanity is a bodily disease, is not to admit an iota in favour of the materialist's creed; it is in fact the very reverse, since the assumption proceeds upon the principle that, prior to this disordered state of the organization, through the medium of which the disease has been introduced, and by which volition has been suspended, the individual who is the subject of the visitation had the power to accept or to refuse a position which the consistent organist must absolutely deny.

There is another error likely to result from too powerful a reaction against the superstitious dogmata of the ancients, and the unmeaning abstractions of the schools. Having arrived at the legitimate conclusion, that insanity is a corporeal malady, we are disposed to carry this conclusion to an illegitimate extent, and imagine, because it is corporeal, it is, therefore, in all instances easily cognizable as to its actual essence and locality; thus we find it assumed in some modern works of credit, that madness, however multifarious in its shapes, and diversified in its colours, is, in effect, nothing more nor less than common inflammation of the brain, and therefore invariably to be encountered by those measures which are judged successful in combating other affections arising from vascular impetus ; a principle-the injurious consequences of which, when carried into practice, we have ourselves actually witnessed.

Upon the whole, then, we would conclude, that he is the most competent to appreciate the nature and peculiarities of insanity, and the best qualified to attempt its dislodgement from the bodily organization, who, fully assured that more or less of physical disorder must necessarily have place in mental hallucination, is at the

same

same time aware of the difference between mere bodily disease, and disease of the understanding, and who is not himself so organically mad as to deny the subordination of matter to mental impulse and motive.

But it is time to attend to the author, whose treatise has been the immediate cause of our suggestions.

That Dr. Burrows estimates duly the limits by which those researches must ever be bounded which involve the connexion be tween organization and intellect, we have great pleasure in offering the following quotation as evidence.

'None dispute that the brain is the seat of the understanding. The structure of this grand organ has been minutely dissected, in order to discover the specific instrument of each intellectual function, by the synthetical operation of which that effect is produced which we call mind. But notwithstanding the industry and research exercised, or the pretensions lately advanced, the futility of every attempt is no less exemplified than the presumption to explain that attribute which the CREATOR, in his inscrutable wisdom, has conferred on him alone whom he made after his own image.

The persuasion that the integrity of the brainular mass was essential to the manifestation of the mental faculties was long a favourite theorem; but like other errors has yielded to observation. For there is no part within the cranium supposed to exercise an intellectual function, that has not been læsed or even destroyed, and yet the understanding has remained clear and undisturbed.'

In reference also to the question respecting the connexion of mental aberration with bodily ailment, he introduces the following remarks, the spirit and tenour of which we fully approve.

No impression, perhaps, has been more detrimental than the scholastic dogma, that the mind, being independent of the body, can simulate all its functions and actions; can sicken, be administered to, recover and relapse; and that consequently all but moral remedies must be secondary, if not nearly useless, every other being incompatible with an immaterial essence like mind.

To discuss the validity of this or that hypothesis would be plunging into an inextricable labyrinth, and is quite foreign to my present purpose. But we may hazard the predicate, that he who relies singly on moral means will be as surely disappointed as he who resorts to the art of medicine only for the cure of insanity.'

The leading opinions to which Dr. Burrows summons the at tention of the public, are these: 1st, Insanity is conceived so very difficult of cure, that few afflicted with it recover; 2dly, It is thought to be an increasing evil; and, 3dly, It is supposed a very prevalent malady:' and to prove that these opinions have no foundation in fact, but have originated in erroneous views of the dis

order,

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