The chief aim of this paper is to illustrate by means of two interesting case histories the forensic importance of this form of mental disorder. It is not intended, however, to enter here into an academic discussion of the problem of paranoia. The term "Paranoia" is even pre-Hippocratic, and any attempt to indicate, even in the briefest manner, the changes which this concept has undergone throughout the ages would require considerably more space than we have at our disposal. I shall, therefore, merely mention that in reviewing the history of paranoia one is unmistakably struck by the fact that those view points and ideas concerning this subject which have indelibly impressed themselves upon it occupy themselves with a study of the personality of the paranoiac rather than with the disease picture as such. Some of the investigators have gone so far as to maintain that paranoia is not a disease at all in the sense that typhoid fever is a disease or pneumonia is a disease, but that the paranoiac picture is rather the expression of an anomalous individuality and, as one author puts it, it is the evolution of a crooked stick. Sander[5] recognized this when he so admirably stated that the abnormal condition develops and unfolds itself in the same way that the normal mind unfolds itself in the normal individual. The cases herein reported have been under my observation now for several years at the Government Hospital for the Insane, and I am indebted for permission to report them to Dr. William A. White, Superintendent of the Hospital. CASE I is a white man, aged 64 on his first admission to the Government Hospital for the Insane, July 9, 1907. This commitment was the direct outcome of a trial for perjury which took place in May, 1906, in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, at which the patient was found guilty. While awaiting sentence he was adjudged insane and sent to this Hospital. The evidence was gathered from the Reports of the Maryland Court of Appeals, dating as far back as 1874, and forms only an incomplete account of the patient's legal activities, inasmuch as many of his law transactions never reached the higher courts and consequently are not reported. In setting aside 1,296 magistrate's judgments obtained by the patient and amounting in the aggregate to $127,836 debt and $2,348 costs, the Court states, among other things, as follows:-- "The gross iniquity of this whole transaction, manifest enough upon its face, is abundantly so by proof. The inference is irresistible that the magistrate who issued these judgments merely wrote them out on his docket without summoning witnesses and without the semblance even of an _ex parte_ trial."