ultimate gradation; and whenever any subject can be regulated by definite quantity, expressed in numbers, it conveys the most certain information. Your Lordship may however judge of the surprize and disappointment I felt when I arrived at the following sentence in the same judgment, "All the cases decide that mere imbecility will not do; that an inability to manage a man's affairs will not do, unless that inability and that incapacity to manage his affairs AMOUNT to evidence that he is of unsound mind, and he must be found to be so." This, my Lord, is an ample confession that there is a degree of mental weakness that _does_ amount to unsoundness, and in this opinion all philosophers and medical practitioners will unhesitatingly concur: but at the same time this admission wholly upsets the former doctrine, that no degree of imbecility "WHATEVER" can constitute this required unsoundness. In your Lordship's judgment on the Portsmouth petition, delivered the 11th December, 1822, it is stated, "It may be very difficult to draw the line between such weakness, which is the proper object of relief in this court, and such as AMOUNTS to insanity," and in the next sentence, "This is the doctrine of Lord Hardwicke, and I follow him in saying it is very difficult to draw the line between such weakness which is the proper object of relief in this court, and such as AMOUNTS to insanity." This is a second corroboration of an opinion that destroys the former doctrine. Finally in the "minutes of conference between your Lordship and certain physicians, held on the 7th January, 1823, in the Portsmouth case," there is an endeavour to explain the nature of _unsoundness_, and of imbecility or weakness;--but it is insufficient to direct the physician to any clue whereby his doubts can be solved, and unfortunately relapses into the original contradictory statement. "The commission which is usually termed a commission of lunacy, and which because it has that name, I observe many persons are extremely misled with respect to the nature of it, and which produced on a former occasion, with respect to this nobleman, a great mass of affidavits, in which they stated he was not an object of a commission of Lunacy.--I say that these words are not much understood.--The law acknowledges the state of idiotcy, and the state of lunacy, which properly understood, is a very different thing from that sort of unsoundness of mind which renders a man incapable of managing his affairs or his person.--And it has now been long settled, not that a commission of lunacy is to be issued; but that a commission is to issue in the nature of a writ de lunatico inquirendo, and then the object of the commission is perfectly satisfied, if the jury shall find upon satisfactory evidence, that the party is of unsound mind, and incapable of managing his own affairs.--The finding of him incapable of managing his own affairs, is not sufficient to authorize further proceedings, but