the power to pursue the right and avoid the wrong, is greatly defective. There is another phasis of cerebral defect not very unlike the last, which of late years has been occurring with increasing frequency, embarrassing our courts, confounding the wise and the simple, and overwhelming respectable families with shame and sorrow. With an intellect unwarped by the slightest excitement or delusion, and with many moral traits, it may be, calculated to please and to charm, its subjects are irresistibly impelled to some particular form of crime. With more or less effort they strive against it, and when they yield at last, their conduct is as much a mystery to themselves as to others. Ordinary criminals excite some touch of pity, on the score of bad education or untamed passions; but if, in the common estimation of the world, there is one criminal more reprehensible than another, it is he who sins against great light and under the smallest temptations,--and, of course, the hottest wrath of an incensed community is kindled against him. At the bar of yonder courtroom stands a youth with an aspect and manner indicative of culture and refinement far above those of the common herd of criminals. He was detected in the very act of committing a grave criminal offence. He has been educated under good moral influences, and possessed a patrimony that supplied every reasonable want. No looseness of living, no violent passion is alleged against him, and no adequate motive appears for the act. For a year or two past he has been unusually restless by day and by night, has slept poorly, and his countenance has worn an expression of distraction and anxiety. Various little details of conduct are related of him, which, though not morally censurable, were offensive to good taste and opposed to the ordinary observances of society. His friends are sure he is not the man he once was, but no expert ventures to pronounce him insane. Looking behind the scene, the mystery clears up, and we behold only a simple operation of cerebral dynamics. A glance at the family-history shows us a great-grandfather, an aunt, two second-cousins, and a brother unequivocally insane, the father and many other members widely noted for eccentricities and irregularities of a kind scarcely compatible with the idea of sanity. Considering that the brain does not spring out of the ground, but is the final product of all the influences which for generations have been working in the cerebral organism, it is not strange that the quality of his brain became so vitiated as to be incapable of some of its highest functions.--Looking a little farther back in our forensic experience, we behold a youth scarcely arrived at the age of legal majority, with a simple, verdant look, arraigned for trial on the charge of murder. He was the servant of a farmer, and his victim was an adopted daughter of the family, and some years younger than himself. One day they were left