The singular appetites which have been noticed seem to have been individual peculiarities, uninfluenced by a morbid condition; but there are cases in which a depraved appetite is symptomatic of disease, where we see persons otherwise possessed of sound judgment longing, not only for the most improper and indigestible food, but for substances of the most extraordinary and even disgusting nature. Thus we have seen patients, more especially young females and pregnant women, devouring dirt, cinders, spiders, leeches, hair, tallow, and paper. An ingenious writer affirms that "more literature in the form of paper and printed books has been thus devoured, than by the first scholars in Christendom." Dr. Darwin tells us that he saw a young lady about ten years of age that used to fill her stomach with earth out of a flowerpot, and then vomited it up, with small stones, bits of wood, and wings of various insects. John Hunter has described an endemic disease among the Africans in Jamaica, in which they devoured dirt. Mason Good, when speaking of this affection, says, "that the longing for such materials is, in this disease, a mere symptom, and rarely shows itself till the frame is completely exhausted by atrophy, dropsy, and hectic fever, brought on by a longing of a much more serious kind,--a longing to return home, a pining for the relations, the scenes, the kindnesses the domestic joys, of which the miserable sufferers have been robbed by barbarians less humanized than themselves, and which they have been forced or trepanned to resign for the less desirable banquet of whips, and threats, and harness, and hunger." Roderic a Castro relates the case of a lady who could eat twenty pounds of pepper, and another who lived upon ice. Tulpius mentions a woman who, during her pregnancy, longed for salt herrings, and ate fourteen hundred at the rate of five herrings per diem. Longius affirms that a lady in Cologne, who was in that state that ladies wish to be who love their lords, took such a fancy to taste the flesh of her husband that she actually assassinated him, and, after indulging in as much fresh meat as the weather permitted, salted the remainder for further use. This cannibal inclination seems not to be uncommon. The said Roderic a Castro knew a woman in the same thriving condition, who felt an inexpressible desire for a bit of the shoulder of a neighbouring baker, and her husband was persecuted by her constant prayers and lamentations to prevail on the worthy man to allow her one bite for charity's sake: but the first bite was so heartily inflicted, that the crusty baker would not submit to a second.