As intemperance combines so many of the agencies which tend to produce insanity, it is justly considered as one of the most prolific sources of this disease. Strong drink exerts its destructive influence upon the whole man, mental, moral, and physical. It dethrones the reason, and inflaming the passions, gives them the supremacy. It creates a morbid excitement throughout the whole nervous system, and especially in the brain, the great central organ of this system, and the instrument of the mind. It affects other organs also, and particularly the stomach, which sympathizes so readily with the brain, that its disorders, as is known to every one, have a great influence upon that organ. Strong drink, therefore, acting in these different ways upon the system, not only expends the vital power rapidly, bringing on premature old age, but it makes its deposites of disease here and there in the various organs, which seriously embarrass them in the performance of their functions. With such an impaired and diseased state of the system, and with the constant excitement to which both body and mind are subjected, it is no wonder that the intemperate are peculiarly liable to insanity. In looking at the causes of insanity we readily discover the reason why children are so seldom insane, though, from the liveliness of their sympathies, they are much more apt to be _temporarily_ deranged by disease than adults are, as we see in the paroxysms of fever. The brain and nervous system require a long series of influences to bring them into such a state, as renders them liable to that class of diseases, which we include under the name of insanity. This state is an accumulated result of the action of predisposing causes, continued for some length of time, perhaps during all the previous life of the patient. But the derangement of the child ceases with the temporary disease which causes it. Its organs, not being incumbered with any accumulations of disease, return readily to the performance of their healthy functions; and its nervous system not having been shattered with repeated attacks of sickness, and not having experienced the wear and tear of trouble and toil, resumes at once its usual free and easy and buoyant condition.