If a physician were to attempt to search into the existing records and procedures on insanity, to collect its legal interpretation, such investigation would probably be a waste of his time, the source of abundant, and perhaps of incurable error; but to these inconveniences he will not be subjected in attentively considering your Lordship's judgments, of which I have availed myself on the present occasion, and which, having been taken down at the time they were delivered, may be presumed not materially incorrect. The documents to which I refer are the judgments of the 22d April, 1815, and the 17th December, 1822, on the Portsmouth petitions, together with the minutes of conference between your Lordship and certain physicians, on the 7th January, 1823. In the judgment on the petition of 1815, it is stated by your Lordship,[A] "I have searched, and caused a most careful search to be made into all the records and procedures on lunacy which are extant. I believe, and I think I may venture to say, that originally commissions of this sort were of two kinds; a commission aiming at, and enquiring whether, the individual had been an idiot ex nativitate, or whether, on the other hand, he was a lunatic. The question whether he was a lunatic, being a question, admitting in the solution of it, of a decision that imputed to him at one time an extremely sound mind, but at other times, an occurrence of insanity, with reference to which, it was necessary to guard his person and his property by a commission issuing. It seems to have been a very long time before those who had the administration of justice in this department, thought themselves at liberty to issue a commission, when the person was represented as not being idiot ex nativitate, as not being lunatic, but as being of UNSOUND MIND, importing by those words, the notion, that the party was in _some such state_, as was to be contra-distinguished from idiotcy, and as he was to be contra-distinguished from lunacy, and yet such as made him a proper object of a commission, in the nature of a commission to inquire of idiotcy, or a commission to inquire of lunacy. From the moment that that had been established, down to this moment, it appears to me to have been at the same time established, that _whatever_ may be the degree of weakness or imbecility of the party to manage his own affairs, if the finding of the jury is only that he was of an extreme imbecility of mind, that he has an inability to manage his own affairs: if they will not proceed to _infer_ from _that_, in their finding, upon oath, that he is of UNSOUND MIND, they have not established, by the result of the inquiry, a case upon which the Chancellor can make a grant, constituting a committee, either of the person or estate. 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