Degenerate children, as Kiernan[182] remarks, early manifest decided neurotic excitability, and tend to neuroses at physiologic crises like the first and second dentition, and the onset and close of puberty. Slight physical or mental perturbation is followed by sleeplessness, delirium, hallucinations, &c. Hyperæsthesia and excessive reaction to pleasant or offensive impressions exist. Vasomotor instability is present, pallor, blushing, palpitations or pre-cardial anxiety result from trivial moral or physical excitants. There is no precocity or aberration of the sexual instinct. The disposition is irritable. The grasshopper is a burden. Psychic pain arises from the most trivial cause, and finds expression in emotional outbursts. Sympathies and antipathies are equally intense. The mental life swings between periods of exaltation and depression, alternating with brief epochs of healthy indifference. Egotism is supreme, and morality absent or perverted. This absence or perversion is often concealed under the guise of moral superiority, religiosity, or cant. Vanity and jealous suspiciousness are common. The intellect and temper are exceedingly irregular. Monotonously feeble, scanty ideation passes readily into seeming brilliance, even to the extent of hallucinations. But ideas are barren as a rule, because generated so rapidly as to destroy each other ere they pass into action. Energy fails ere aught can be completed. The inability to distinguish between desires and facts produces seeming mendacity. The will in its apparent exuberance, its capricious energy, and innate futility, matches and distorts the one-sided talent or whimsical genius which may exist. The whole of this mental state may not be present. The tendency to introspection, to morbid fear, to gloom, to hallucinations, to alternations of depression and exaltation, may occur in a degenerate child in whom has been otherwise preserved that secondary ego which is the latest and greatest acquirement of the race. In the same class, according to George Parkman,[183] an American alienist of more than eighty years ago, brilliant talents, astonishing facility of receiving and communicating ideas often appear suddenly at puberty, especially in females, to be later followed by mediocrity, disappointment, and supineness.