Falret, whose researches have thrown much light on this affection, believes that it is more disposed to be hereditary than any other kind of insanity. He saw a mother and her daughter attacked with suicidal melancholy, and the grandmother of the latter was at Charenton for the same cause. An individual, he says, committed suicide in Paris. His brother, who came to attend the funeral, cried out on seeing the body—“What fatality! My father and uncle both destroyed themselves; my brother has imitated their example; and twenty times during my journey hither I thought of throwing myself into the Seine!” Gall also relates the case of a dyer, of a very taciturn humour, who had five sons and a daughter. The eldest son, after being settled in a prosperous business with a family around him, succeeded, after many attempts, in killing himself by jumping from the third story of his house. The second son, who was rather taciturn, had some domestic troubles, lost part of his fortune at play, and strangled himself at the age of thirty-five. The third threw himself from the window into his garden, but did not hurt himself; he pretended he was trying to fly. The fourth tried one day to fire a pistol down his throat, but was prevented. The fifth was of a bilious, melancholic temperament, quiet, and devoted to business; he and his sister shewed no signs of being affected with their brothers’ malady. One of their cousins committed suicide. Among the physical causes of self-destruction, insidious affections of the brain must stand prominently forward. It is not often that the physician is permitted to examine after death the state of this organ; but there can be no doubt that, in the great majority of instances, the brain will be found to have undergone a serious structural alteration. “During the last twenty-five years,” says Dr. G. Mantell, “many cases of suicide have come under my notice in which the mental hallucination which led to self-destruction has depended on lesions of the brain, occasioned by slight or neglected injuries of the head, to which neither the patient nor his friends attached any importance. In several instances of self-destruction, without any assignable moral cause, and in which no previous signs of fatuity or insanity were manifested, I have found, upon a post mortem examination, either circumscribed induration or softening of the brain, or thickening and adhesions of some portions of its membranes. The conviction was forced upon my mind that very many of the _so called_ nervous or hypochondriacal affections, which are generally considered as imaginary and dependent on mental emotions, are ascribable to physical causes, and frequently originate from slight lesions of the brain.” The learned doctor relates the following cases in illustration of his views:—