the expression of close and critical attention, or the power of quick and shrewd concentration. They know what to study and what to reject; but when they read, they read to purpose.

Nor can you do better than take example from them as to their methods of application, if you cannot hope to rise to the range of their studies. - Blackwood's Magazine.

THE protracted inquiry in "Nowell v. Williams," suspended for a time by the Long Vacation, is interesting in many ways, and not least so because it shows how long and arduous an investigation with respect to the sanity of a person must be, if it is to be thorough. The opinions of two doctors, formed on what they saw or heard at a short interview, and what is told them by some relative all that the law now requires are but uncertain guides. If you desire to be sure, the whole life and habits of the person whose sanity is in question must be studied, the opinions of many different persons must be taken; and this is the mode-tedious, no doubtwhich is being pursued in the action brought by Dr. Nowell against Mr. Williams, his brother-in-law, for unlawfully detaining him in a lunatic asylum. The fact is, that the ordinary, practical tests of insanity are much too rough and coarse. Sufficient as a means of detecting cases of violent madness, they are quite worthless when we have to do with the subtler forms of mental disease. One of the earliest words in every language is some equivalent for "mad." It conveys the most primitive of ideas. And yet, as every day's experience teaches, the extreme difficulty of defining the term, and the urgent necessity of having a clear definition of madness, grow more manifest. "Mad doctors" differ; no two use the same tests of sanity; and both the legal and the medical criterions of insanity are found in practice to fail. The usual explanation of the growing difficulties connected with this question is, that the subject is studied much more intelligently than it was; and that our doctors now recognize the existence of problems which did not occur to their predecessors, whose notion of insanity was either furious mania or idiocy. But this does not exactly indicate the crux of the matter. is still questionable whether the common

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place about insanity being almost unknown in barbarous communities is quite correct, or whether it is not due to what Mr. Mill called a fallacy of observation. Barbarism may have its own conceptions of madness, its tests of which may be sound, though they might not recommend themselves to the European mind; and it would probably be very difficult for Dr. Maudsley or Dr. Winslow to discriminate indications of mania, delusion, or eccentricity among Kaffirs, which were clear enough to Kaffirs. What to the eye of a Zulu is clear evidence of insanity may be entirely misunderstood or unperceived by the Englishman. The savage in the Andaman Islands who, by wearing a white hat, and nothing else, and calling himself "Lord Palmerston," recommended himself to the English traveller as a zealous votary of civilization, was possibly regarded as a hopeless maniac by his own friends and relatives.

Dr. Maudsley, in his work on "The Psychology and Pathology of Mind," shows that the struggle for existence which goes on in the heart of an old civilization, the worry, the friction, the conflict of desires, produce, as an inevitable result, a large amount of insanity. But civilization has its compensations. We have no crétins or cagots-the products of poor nourishment, bad water, and miserable houses. The stunted intellects of the descendants of people who for generations have lived upon inadequate fare are not the outcome of civilization. But what cannot be denied is that civilization has multiplied the forms of insanity. It has called into existence varieties hitherto unknown; and this is the chief cause of the growing difficulty in determining the existence of insanity. What is equally clear, is that civilization has increased the number of complex forms of insanity-cases in which disease is found in conjunction with great strength in some organs; cases in which

sanity and insanity are curiously entwined. The old notion, for instance, that a man is insane when, and only when, he has no control over his thoughts and actions, or when he takes imaginations for realities, is found no longer to suffice. Civilization has bred species of insanity which refuse to be classed under the old categories. Almost the only forms of madness which were nurtured in a poor, backward state of society, were those due to insufficient food or bad water, melancholia, or excess of some of the great primitive passions; but in the complex relations of an old civilization, how many opportunities are there for a man to betray peculiarities and eccentricity. Every man, we may suppose, has some trait, latent or revealed, in which he differs from his fellows. There is some one point in which, if his nature had its way, and the occasion arose, he would differ from them; and when society is complex, when the code of duty and etiquette has extended to every possible action of life, when there is a proper way of doing everything, from birth to death, from dressing in the morning to the inverse ceremony of night, the natural humor of the man is and must be occasionally fretted or irritated into abnormal activity. The latent madness, that is to say, the point at which other people will have it that he unreasonably differs from them, has every chance of being brought to light, when every faculty is called into exercise, and when society makes broad its phylacteries and multiplies its commandments. In short, it is more reasonable, so to speak, to go mad than it was. Take, as an illustration, the following instance, mentioned by an American writer on insanity: Colonel Mwas a lawyer by profession, and district attorney in one of the Western States. He was a man of remarkable ability, and a consummate advocate. But he had one or two marked peculiarities, which, in another state of civilization, might never have come to light, or which would have been regarded as a matter of no consequence to anybody. "I feel," he said, with respect to one of his oddities, that I am cousin to the Duke of Wellington and to Napoleon. It seems ridiculous. I can't make out any kind of proof. I even

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laugh at it. It concerns nobody. has in it no dangerous element. Why, then, should I be interfered with for harboring a delusion, if you choose to call it so, no more absurd than a thousand religious sects feel themselves happy in resting upon?" Another peculiarity was a strange belief that if his nose were cut off it would grow again, just as his hair did; and under the influence of this view-of no consequence to anybody but himself-he actually cut off his nose. His last peculiarity was great quarrelsomeness at the bars of hotels, which he liked to frequent-a failing which would have been very innocent, if transferred to Arkansas or Texas. His sanity was repeatedly called in question, but his skill as an advocate was such, that he never failed to convince the courts that, according to any of the accepted tests of insanity, he was a rational man. And yet people instinctively felt that he ought not to be at liberty. His quarrelsomeness made him a dangerous member of society, and, in fact, mental disease showed itself unmistakably before he died. And yet this man might, if he had lived a century ago, and been devoid of education, have never been suspected of insanity. He would not, in all probability, have confused his understanding by making physiological theories. His vanity would not have been so excited by reading about the Napoleonic wars, as to make himself suppose that he was a kinsman of great conquerors; and even if it had, it would not have mattered so much in an uneducated society, where the preposterousness of his claims would not have shocked any one. He could control his actions; if he harbored delusions, they did not influence his conduct towards other people; and he was possessed of far more intelligence than the mass of sane persons.

This case illustrates another peculiarity. Modern society is not content with a man's actions being reasonable; his opinions must also conform to a certain standard. It will not allow a person to believe that he is related to the Royal Family, or that he is followed every night by a man in a white hat, or that if he came by his own, the Kohinoor would be his. And yet who is injured by these delusions, so long as the be

liever in them does not insist upon mixing himself up in state affairs, or upon taking possession of what he thinks is his own? He may in other respects be a sensible person, and his little vagaries may even give zest to his life.

What is the inference we draw from all this? Why, that it becomes more and more clear that to settle the question whether a man is so insane that he ought to be confined, a minute inquiry into his whole habits and life, and feelings towards those about him, is necessary. The simple question is not whether his mind is perfectly rational. How many would pass safely through such an investigation? The question is whether he ought to be his own master; and every detail of conduct, the smallest acts and circumstances-in short, comprehensive evidence, such as has been adduced in "Nowell v. Williams'must be examined, before an opinion can be safely formed. The actual process is very different. Two doctors have a short talk with the supposed lunatic; they go to the interview with their minds prepossessed by what has been told them by his friends; they judge of his sanity by the inspection of a small segment of the circle of his life. The law fails even to secure that the informants on whom the doctors must rely know his habits.

The "order" need not be signed by any one who is intimate with the alleged lunatic. In one instance in which a person was confined, it came out that the "connection" of which the law speaks was based almost entirely on the fact that the person who asked for the detention had once knocked the lunatic down. Legislation in regard to this subject has gone far astray. Before depriving an alleged lunatic of his liberty, the old law usually insisted, even at a time when the chief forms of insanity were simple and obvious, upon an examination as thorough as if the truth of a criminal charge had been in question. Modern legislation has allowed the question to be virtually determined by the certificate of two doctors, based on a cursory examination and hearsay evidence. The old law generally allowed the matter to be determined by a jury, who were disposed to look to the broad question whether it was safe to leave the lunatic at large. Recent legislation practically leaves the matter in every instance in the hands of two doctors, who are inclined to look only at the narrow issue-whether there is any element of insanity present; and to ignore the only question worthy of consideration whether society has reason to dread the alleged lunatic being at liberty.-The Spectator.

V.

THE last period of ancient Egyptian history extends through about seven hundred years, from the decline of the Empire, about B.C. 1200, to the Persian conquest by Cambyses, B.C. 527.* It begins with the loss of the foreign provinces. The Egyptian monarchy thus shrinks from the dimensions of an empire to those of a kingdom. Next the kingdom breaks up, resolving itself into an aggregate of principalities. Thus internally powerless, its independence is

* It now seems certain on Egyptian evidence that the conquest of Egypt by Cambyses must be carried up from B.C. 525, long the received date, to B.C. 527.

threatened by the great Ethiopian monarchy on the south, and by the Assyrian Empire on the north-east. At length the battle-ground of the Asiatic and African powers is shifted by the strength of Assyria from Syria to Egypt itself, and there the Ethiopians in vain strive to beat back the overwhelming force of the Assyrians. With the decline of Assyria time for Egypt, once more independent. and Ethiopia there comes a breathingBut Babylonia inherits the policy and the success of Assyria, and Persia with the conquest of Babylon takes up the when Egypt is reduced by Cambyses to scheme and finally accomplishes it, a province of the great Eastern Empire. Here the history of the Pharaohs closes.

territory, but also to destroy its orthodox influence in his kingdom. The most interesting name in the list is that of Judah, strangely written Judahmelek, where we should have expected the word Judah in the second place if "melek" be kingdom.

Thus for a moment the Eastern power of Egypt revived, but Ethiopia was ir revocably lost, and the successors of Shishak wanted power and energy to maintain his policy. Their history for the next two centuries is a blank. We know little more than their names, and that ultimately their line broke up into three royal or princely houses.

An event recorded only in the Chronicles may be the key to the sudden decline of the house of Shishak. We there read how under Rehoboam's second successor, Asa, Zerah the Ethiopian invaded Palestine, and was defeated by the king of Judah. This war is nowhere else recorded. The succession of the priest-kings is incomplete, and we know nothing of their history for a century and a half or more later. Was Zerah one of them? Did he conquer the family of Shishak, and on his reverse retreat to Ethiopia, leaving them to survive in peaceful but impotent possession of Egypt? Some such events must be read between the lines of what we know of the history of this age, and it is precisely what occurred again and again in later times. The remote basis of operations of the Ethiopian kings who conquered Egypt made their tenure of the country insecure, and each expedition left it rather paralyzed than dependent.

An Ethiopian conquest is the first event that breaks the dull monotony of the history of Shishak's successors. The story is well told by the conqueror himself, in a stele which is by far the most interesting state document in the whole range of hieroglyphic texts. was found at Napata, the Ethiopian capital. Before speaking of its contents we must endeavor to form a clear idea of Ethiopia, known to the Egyptians as Kesh, the Cush of Scripture.

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ed of two widely different regions. northern portion is the narrow Nile-valley, obstructed by several cataracts and shut in by barren rocky deserts; the southern is the broader valley, bounded by deserts subject to tropical rains which gradually change to prairies. The division may be placed not far from Napata, near which the Nile takes a great bend, flowing south-west for a long distance in its upper course before that site is reached. We cannot therefore divide the two tracts from east to west, as the more fertile country is at first on the upper but more northern course of the stream. Thus each region contains about half the course of the Nile between the First Cataract, the boundary of Egypt, and the junction of the White and Blue Niles. Lower Ethiopia is the poorest portion of the Nile-valley. Upper Ethiopia is in part a splendid country, of old richly peopled, and containing great cities. The two regions may be best conceived of as corresponding to the plain of the Delta, and to the valley of Upper Egypt, inverted. Here the narrow valley is the natural bulwark of the spreading country beyond. No invader could advance from Egypt upon the Nile, for it is no longer a water-highway. Nor could he move up the long tedious course of the narrow valley without risk of being stopped at every few miles by a much smaller force. only practicable approach was through the waterless desert, which foiled the enterprise of Cambyses. The oldest royal capital was Napata, as the nearest point to Egypt, the sovereignty of which was claimed by the kings who ruled there. When this pretension was finally overthrown, Meroë, probably recommended by its central position, succeeded to Napata.

The