There seems to be in the minds of men an instinctive awe of anything that appertains to the insane. In olden times a disordered mind was considered of divine or diabolic origin as it evinced good or evil tendencies. This belief lasted even until the present century. Many old women who were the victims of senile dementia and kindred ills, were accused of witchcraft and intercourse with the devil, here in the United States, not a century ago. Witches were executed in England and men burned at the stake in Spain, not two hundred years ago, for the crime of demoniacal possession. Even in this enlightened age men are accustomed to consider insanity rather from its psychical standpoint than from its physical aspect. They do not take into consideration the fact that insanity is due to a physical lesion, and that its vagaries are but the symptoms of brain disease or brain deformity. The inhabitants of the borderlands are invested with a certain shadowy mystery which separates them from the rest of mankind, and which makes them appear to us as denizens of another psychical world than ours. In the Middle Ages, cranks, whose eccentricities took a religious turn, were considered holy. St. Simon Stylites was a very pronounced crank, and a very holy man also, because he chose to live the greater portion of his life perched on a pillar seventy feet high. St. Anthony was another holy crank who never, in all his life, washed his feet. Poor Joan of Arc was burned at the stake because she was "possessed of a false and lying devil." She has been recently proposed for canonization by the same church that burned her, and thus, in a measure, had justice done her. I do not think, however, that this is any recompense for the terrible agony inflicted on this unfortunate victim of hystero-epilepsy. Says Maudsley in "Responsibility in Mental Disease": "Some of the prophets of the Old Testament presented symptoms which can hardly be interpreted as other than the effects of madness; certainly if they were not mad, they imitated very closely some of its most striking features." Jeremiah takes a long journey to the river Euphrates and hides a linen girdle in a hole of a rock. He then returns home and in a few days makes the same journey, and finds the girdle rotten and good for nothing. Ezekiel digs a hole in the wall of his house, and through it removes his household goods, instead of through the door. Hosea marries a prostitute because he said he had been commanded by God so to do. Isaiah stripped himself naked and paraded up and down in sight of all the people.