treatment of insanity, but they do not constitute any direct evidences of mind. On the scale of intellectual capacity there is an extensive range, some are eminently gifted, and others so sparingly supplied that they are unfit for the common purposes of life, and require to be protected. These are Ideots ex Nativitate. If it be attempted to teach them, they are deficient of the capacity to acquire sufficient to manage the property they may be possessed of, or to conduct themselves. Is it here incumbent on the medical practitioner to state that this natural deficiency of intellect arises from unsoundness of mind, or that the unsoundness is the effect of such deficiency: in order that the individual may experience the wise, politic, and humane protection of the law?—It frequently occurs that those of extensive capacity and high attainments are by an apoplectic or paralytic attack suddenly deprived of their intellectual faculties, and reduced to the state of an ideot ex nativitate. Is it in this case necessary, for the legal protection of the party, to insist on the hypothesis of unsoundness? Is it insufficient to detail the miserable remnants of his former state, and exhibit to the jury the shocking spectacle? Must there be a compulsion to infer, that this abolition of the faculties amounts to evidence of the unsoundness of his mind? We are acquainted with the mind from the phœnomena it displays; but the cause of these phœnomena is to us inscrutable: by discourse and conduct we infer its soundness, by the same evidences its unsoundness must be detected. This appears however to militate against the dictum of law, which states, “Whatever may be the degree of weakness or imbecility of the party—whatever may be the degree of incapacity of the party to manage his own affairs, if the finding of the jury is only that he was of an extreme imbecility of mind, that he has an inability to manage his affairs: if they will not proceed to infer from that, in their finding upon oath, that he is of _unsound mind_, they have not established, by the result of their enquiry, a case, upon which the Chancellor can make a grant constituting a committee either of the person or estate.” Is not this extreme imbecility of mind and inability to manage his affairs the only evidence of his unsoundness of mind? if not, what further is required? for it is not necessary, according to law, that he should be a lunatic. If these be insufficient to constitute him of _unsound mind_, then the inference is clear and warranted, that he may be of extreme imbecility, and have an inability to manage his affairs, and, notwithstanding all this, may be of _sound mind_: and if _unsoundness_, be _some such state_, as may be contradistinguished from idiotcy and lunacy, then an ideot and a lunatic may be of _sound mind_.