=General Intellectual Mania.=--By many medical writers general intellectual mania is divided into mania and melancholia. The mind in the former type of the disease is involved in the most chaotic confusion possible, and there is also considerable bodily derangement. The moral faculties become more or less affected, and the patient‘s social and domestic relations are greatly altered. At one time he is subject to violent fits of immoderate laughter, at another he is gloomy and taciturn; sometimes quiet and tractable, at others wild and excited, necessitating close confinement. He is haunted by wild delusions, which at times take entire possession of him, and under the influence of which he acts in the most extraordinary manner. In the latter--melancholia, or mania with depression--delusion may be absent, or, rather, for a time undetectable. The sufferer is gloomy, and troubled with unhappy thoughts, which sometimes lead him to self-destruction. He is sleepless, and rejects his food as unnecessary. He may be aroused for a short time by questions addressed to him, his replies to which are usually given correctly, most frequently in monosyllables; but the moment his questioner leaves him he relapses into his former gloomy state. =Partial Intellectual Mania.=--The term _monomania_, first suggested by Esquirol, is now generally given to this variety of insanity. The patient, in the simplest form of this disorder, becomes possessed of some single notion, which is alike contradictory to common sense and to his own experience. Thus, he may fancy himself made of glass; and influenced by this idea, he walks with care, and in dread of being broken by contact with other bodies. In the case of an inmate at the City of London Asylum, the presence of a weasel in the stomach was stated by one woman. Esquirol mentions the case of a woman with hydatids in her womb, who believed that she was pregnant with the devil. Most of these strange fancies appear to be dependent on errors of sensation. Monomaniacs are ready enough to declare their predominant idea; yet at times, and that without the occurrence of a lucid interval, they will as carefully conceal it. “In the simplest form of monomania, the understanding appears to be, and probably is, perfectly sound on all subjects but those connected with the hallucination. When, however, the disorder is more complicated, involving a longer train of morbid ideas, we have the high authority of Georget for believing that, though the patient may reason on many subjects unconnected with the particular illusion on which the insanity turns, the understanding is more extensively deranged than is generally suspected.” MORAL MANIA