Neurotics are not met with to any extent among barbarous races, but are numerous in civilised communities, where the weak are preserved from early death and then subjected to the struggle for existence. Neurotics are individuals naturally imperfect in some directions, but by the law of economy of growth they are often superior in others. Their disordered nervous functions and hyperæsthesia are not, necessarily, indicative of inferiority of general organisation compared to their ancestry. They may simply imply a more rapid advance in some one direction in the development of the nervous system than can be kept up with by the remainder. These defects may in some cases be the advance guards in the progress of the development of the race. As the nervous system controls nutrition in all departments of the organism, anomalies occur with erratic nervous functions in such individuals. In these neurotics are often found defective development involving the bony and other structures. They have fine and delicate features, small jaws and defective teeth. These are the results of general systemic modifications connected with the neurotic state. The arthritic diathesis occurs also; it is one of the underlying conditions of many neurotic manifestations, often responsible for acquired bony deformities, not infrequently involving the jaws to some extent. Neurotic degenerate symptoms from a mental standpoint are noticeable long before deformities of the osseous system are developed. They show themselves in mental weakness, extreme stupidity, and precocity. Under the first class the child is obstinate, quarrelsome, malignant, even immorally inclined, and is often spoken of as being wicked or vicious. Harriet C. B. Alexander[260] says the ruling instinct in the child of three or four is self-gratification. It destroys what it dislikes. Among the earliest manifestations of morbid mental activity in childhood are hallucinations, which depend on already registered perceptions. In many instances even moral agencies produce sudden explosions of mental disorders. The inherited tendencies of childhood predispose to these attacks. As Clouston has shown, neuroses and psychoses not requiring hospital treatment are by no means uncommon in the too sensitive child with hereditary taint. Children of this class have crying fits and miserable periods on slight or no provocation. As Clouston has also shown, precocity, over-sensitiveness, unhealthy strictness in morals and religion for a child, or too vivid imagination, want of courage, thinness and craving for animal food, are common characters. These children are over-sensitive, over-imaginative, are too fearful to be physiologic, and tend, as a general thing, to be unhealthily religious, precociously intellectual, and at first hyperæsthetically conscientious.