“My good friend here informs me, sir, you are so fortunate as to possess a son of distinguished abilities, and who is at present labouring under some of those precursory indications of incipient disease of the cerebro-psychical organs, of which I have been, I may say, somewhat successful in diagnosing the symptoms. Unless I have been misinformed, he has, for a considerable time, experienced persistent headache of a kephalalgic or true cerebral type, and has now advanced to the succeeding stage of taciturnity and depression, not* unaccompanied with isolation, and probably constipation: but as yet without hallucination, though possibly, and, as my experience of the great majority of these cases would induce me to say, probably he is not** undisturbed by one or more of those latent, and, at first, trifling aberrations, either of the intelligence or the senses, which in their preliminary stages escape the observation of all but the expert nosologist.” *Anglice, “accompanied.” **Anglice, “disturbed.” “There, you see,” said Osmond, “Dr. Wycherley agrees with me: yet I assure you I have only detailed the symptoms, and not the conclusion I had formed from them.” Jane inquired timidly what that conclusion was. “Miss Hardie, we think it one of those obscure tendencies which are very curable if taken in time----” Dr. Wycherley ended the sentence: “But no longer remediable if the fleeting opportunity is allowed to escape, and diseased action to pass into diseased organisation.” Jane looked awestruck at their solemnity; but Mr. Hardie, who was taking advice against the grain, turned satirical. “Gentleman,” said he, “be pleased to begin by moderating your own obscurity; and then perhaps I shall see better how to cure my son's disorder. What the deuce are you driving at?” The two doctors looked at one another inquiringly, and so settled how to proceed. Dr. Wycherley explained to Mr. Hardie that there was a sort of general unreasonable and superstitious feeling abroad, a kind of terror of the complaint with which his son was threatened; _“and which,_ instead of the most remediable of disorders, is looked at as the most incurable of maladies:” it was on this account he had learned to approach the subject with singular caution, and even with a timidity which was kinder in appearance than in reality; that he must admit. “Well, you may speak out, as far as I am concerned,” said Mr. Hardie, with consummate indifference. “Oh, yes!” said Jane, in a fever of anxiety; “pray conceal nothing from us.” “Well, then, sir, I have not as yet had the advantage of examining your son personally, but, from the diagnostics, I have no doubt whatever he is labouring under the first fore-shadowings of cerebro-psychical perturbation. To speak plainly, the symptoms are characteristic of the initiatory stage of the germination of a morbid state of the phenomena of intelligence.” His unprofessional hearers only stared.