"On approaching a small farmhouse at a place called ----, I heard," says Dr. Robertson, "a most peculiar howling noise, and, to my horror, when I came near the house I saw a lunatic _stark naked_, confined to a room, and looking through the wooden bars that closed the windows, for there was no glass whatever. He is about nineteen years of age, and I heard from his mother that up to ten or eleven years he was a most intelligent boy; but at that age he suddenly lost the power of speech and became moody and abstracted, wandering about the fields alone, and constantly uttering a low, muttering noise, and with incessant tendency to mischief. By careful watching, the family prevented him injuring himself and others, until of late he has got so strong and unmanageable, and his inclination for destruction is so great, that they have been obliged to confine him in the room I have described. He breaks the window directly it is glazed, tears his bed-clothes into shreds, and won't allow a stitch of clothing to remain on his body; besides, his habits are most disgusting."[273] The incumbent of the parish wrote: "This case is indeed only suited for a lunatic asylum. The form which his lunacy has assumed is most shocking, and is detrimental to morality." An English tourist happening to see this case had him removed to the Monaghan Asylum. One cannot but remark that what an English tourist did, the proper authorities ought to have done. The law appears to have been sufficient for the occasion. The members of the Commission were not content with hearsay evidence. "We took occasion ourselves," they report, "to visit several of these cases in different parts of the country. Some of them we found in a deplorably neglected condition; others disturbing the arrangements of a whole family, the head of which would willingly contribute a small sum towards maintenance in some suitable place of refuge. It admits of no doubt that many a case, if taken in hand at an early stage, might have been restored to society, instead of lapsing into hopeless, incurable insanity. Serious evil often results from the freedom with which idiots of both sexes are permitted to wander abroad, often teased and goaded to frenzy by thoughtless children, often the victims of ill treatment or the perpetrators of offences far worse. The interests of the public, no less than of the insane, require that means should be adopted to ascertain that all of that class are properly cared for. That can only be done by substituting the visit of a medical man for that of the constable, and a professional report for the incomplete return that is now made."