_Mendacity._ Another peculiarity of hysterical women is the irresistible tendency to lie, which leads them to utter senseless falsehoods just for the pleasure of deceiving and making believe. They sham suicide and sickness or write anonymous letters full of inventions. Many, from motives of spite or vanity, accuse servants of dishonesty, in order to revel in their disgrace and imprisonment. The favourite calumny, however, is always an accusation of indecent behaviour, sometimes made against their fathers and brothers, but generally against a priest or medical man. The accusations, in most cases, are so strange and fantastic as to be quite unworthy of belief, but sometimes, unfortunately, they obtain credence. The commonest method adopted for spreading these calumnies is by means of anonymous letters. In one case, a young girl of twenty-five belonging to a distinguished family, pestered a respectable priest with love-letters and shortly afterwards accused him of seduction. Another girl of eighteen informed the Attorney for the State that she had frequently been the victim of immoral priests and accused one of her female cousins of complicity. According to her story, while praying at church, a certain Abbot R... took her into the sacristy and entreated her to elope with him to Spain. She refused indignantly, and hoping to soften her, he twice stabbed himself in her presence, whereat she fainted, and on recovering consciousness, found the priest at her feet, begging forgiveness. She further accused the same cousin of having taken her to a convent, where she was seduced by a priest, the nuns acting as accomplices. A subsequent medical examination proved that no seduction had taken place and that she was suffering from hysteria. In another case, a girl of sixteen, the daughter of an Italian general, complained to her father that a certain lieutenant, her neighbour at table, had used indecent language to her. Shortly afterwards, a shower of anonymous letters troubled the peace of the household--declarations of love addressed to the girl's mother and threats to the daughter. It was discovered that the girl herself was the writer of all these letters. Anonymous letter-writing is so common among hysterical persons, that it may be considered a pathognomonical characteristic. The handwriting is of a peculiar character, or rather it shows a peculiar tendency to vary from excessive size to extreme smallness, a characteristic we have noticed in epileptics. _Delirium._ Hysterical, like epileptic, subjects often suffer from melancholia or monomaniacal delirium. Indeed, according to Morel, this symptom is more frequent when the other morbid phenomena are absent. Psychic hysteria, like epilepsy, may exist unaccompanied by the characteristic hysterical attack, and then, as is the case with epilepsy, it is most dangerous to society.