These degenerate children have a tendency, as C. F. Folsom[184] remarks, to manifest aberrant tendencies at the periods of stress, which may, in Folsom's judgment, be congenital, or due to early interference with normal brain development. These show themselves in childhood and infancy by irregularity or disturbed sleep, irritability, apprehension, strange ideas, great sensitiveness to external impressions, high temperature, delirium or convulsions from slight causes, disagreeable dreams and visions, romancing, intense feeling, periodic headache, muscular twitching, capricious appetite, and great intolerance of stimulants and narcotics. At puberty developmental anomalies, and not infrequently perverted sexual instincts, are observed in both sexes. During adolescence there is often excessive shyness or bravado, always introspection and self-consciousness, and sometimes abeyance or absence of the sexual instinct, which, however, is frequently of extraordinary intensity. The imitative and imaginative faculties may be quick. The affections or emotions are vehement but shallow. Vehement dislikes are formed, and intense personal attachments result in extraordinary friendships, which not seldom swing around suddenly into bitter enmity or indifference. The passions are unduly a force in the character, which lacks will power. The individual's higher brain centres are not well inhibited, and he dashes about like a ship without a rudder, fairly well if the winds be fair and the seas be calm, but dependent on the elements for the character and the time of the final wreck. Invention, poetry, music, artistic taste, philanthropy, intensity, and originality, are sometimes of a higher order among these persons, but desultory, half-finished work and shiftlessness are much more common. With many of them concentrated, sustained effort, and attempts to keep them to it are impossible. Their common-sense perception of the relations of life, executive or business faculty and judgment are seldom well developed. The memory is now and then extraordinary. They are apt to be self-conscious, egotistic, and morbidly conscious. They easily become victims of insomnia, neurasthenia, hypochondria, neuroticism, hysteria, or insanity. They offend against the proprieties of life and commit crime with less cause or provocation than other persons. While many of them are among the most gifted and attractive people in their community, the majority are otherwise, and possess an uncommon capacity for making fools of themselves, and of being a nuisance to their friends and of little use to the world.