It would be premature to assume that the murderer of Mr. Gold, or the man who attempted to assassinate the President of the United States of America, is insane. There are circumstances in connection with each of these tragedies which must suggest the reflection that the assailants were possibly, or even probably, of unsound mind. We do not, however, propose to discuss these features of the respective cases at this juncture. The full facts are not, as yet, ascertained; but enough is known to warrant an endeavor to clear the way for future remark by disposing of the objection that the suspected perpetrator of the Brighton outrage and the would-be assassin of the President both showed "forethought" and "method." It is a common formula for the expression of doubt as to the irresponsibility of an alleged lunatic, that there is "method in his madness." Nothing can be farther from the truth than the inference to which this observation is intended to point. It is not in the least degree necessary that a madman should be unconscious of the act he performs, or of its nature as a violation of the law of God or man; nor is it necessary that he should do the deed under an ungovernable impulse, or at the supposed bidding of God or devil, angel or fiend. The forms of mental disease to which these presumptions apply are coarse developments of insanity. Dr. Prichard was among the first of English medico-psychologists to recognize the existence of a more subtle form of disease, which he termed "moral insanity." Herbert Spencer supplied the key-note to this mystery of madness when he propounded the doctrine of "dissolution;" and Dr. Hughlings Jackson has since applied that hypothesis to the elucidation of morbid mental states and their correlated phenomena. When disorganizing--or, if we may borrow an expression from the terminology of geological science, _denuding_--disease attacks the mental organism, it, so to say, strips off, layer by layer, the successive strata of "habit," "principle," and "nature," which compose the character. First in order go the higher moral qualities of the mind; next those which are the result of personally formed habits; then the inherited principles of personal and social life; at length the polish which civilization gives to humanity is lost, and in the process of denudation the evolutionary elements of man's nature are progressively destroyed, until he is reduced to the level of a creature inspired by purely animal passions, and obeying the lower brutish instincts. The term "moral insanity" is accurate as far as it goes, but it expresses only the first stage in a process of dissolution which is essentially the same throughout, but which has unfortunately received different designations as its several features have been recognized and studied apart. The difference between the subject of "moral insanity" and the general paralytic, who has lost all sense of decency and lives the life of a beast, is one of degree. The