Connected with these subjects, there is a point of considerable importance, and of frequent occurrence, which yet remains to be examined, and with which the present essay will conclude: namely, the state of mind, under which, a person may legally dispose of his property by will. Medical practitioners are often called upon to attest the competence or incapacity of particular persons to the performance of this act, which requires a state of disposing mind. In many instances it is deferred to that extremity of bodily disease when recovery is hopeless. To urge its propriety or necessity at an earlier period, often excites alarm or despondency, and such state of feeling, the medical attendant, in many disorders, is unwilling to excite. As a person of liberal education, and from the enquiries he has made during his attendance on the patient, he is justly presumed a proper judge of his competence to dispose. This instrument is termed a will, which does not simply imply an act of volition, but the volition of a sound or sane mind; because a lunatic, of all men, is most the creature of volition. The same conditions of intellect which have been heretofore enumerated, as exempting him from punishment, and disqualifying him from the management of his affairs, would, as far as a medical opinion may prevail, equally disable him from disposing of his property: such disposal involving the most important part of its management. There is great, perhaps insuperable, difficulty in considering this subject in a general point of view. It is presumed, that no person, actually under a commission of lunacy, could legally dispose of his property by will, because such instrument confides the management of his affairs to others. But in the judgment before cited, and where the law is expounded by the highest and most competent authority, it appears, that the legal definition of a lunatic, implies a person interchangeably visited by insanity and reason. “The question whether he was a lunatic, being a question, admitting in the solution of it of a decision, that imputed to him at one time an _extremely sound mind_, but at other times an occurrence of _insanity_, with reference to _which_, it was necessary to guard his person and his property by a commission issuing.”