hypochondriac or hysteric state, imagines himself watched with no favourable eye. Because he is watched and made the subject of audible comments (hallucinatory or delusional), he concludes that he must be a person of some importance. Some great political movement takes place; he throws himself into it, either in a fixed character that he has already constructed for himself, or with the vague idea that he is an influential personage. He seeks interviews, holds actual conversation with the big men of the day, accepts the common courtesy shown him by those in office as a tribute to his value, is rejected, however, and then judges himself to be the victim of jealousy or of rival cabals, makes intemperate and querulous complaints to higher officials, perhaps makes violent attacks upon them, and being incarcerated in jail or asylum, looks upon this as the end of a long series of persecutions which have broken the power of a skilled diplomatist, a capable military commander, a prince of the blood, an agent of a camarilla, a paramour of some exalted personage, or finally the Messiah Himself. All through this train of ideas there runs a chain of logic and inference in which there is no gap. If the inferences of the patient were based on correctly observed facts and properly correlated with his actual surroundings, his conclusions would be perfectly correct. For years and years many such patients exhibit a single delusive idea as the only prominent symptom. There is hereditary taint in most of these subjects, who are strange in disposition from infancy. As children they frequently shun society and indulge in day-dreams. Their bodily growth is normal, but even trifling disease takes on a cerebral tinge. They may show talent in special directions, but their intelligence rarely passes out of the puerile stage. They often brood over a feminine ideal, a girl who has never encouraged them, and whom they persecute with absurd plans of marriage.