together to take care of the house, a little girl in the neighborhood having come in to keep them company. While engaged in the domestic services, quietly and pleasantly, he invited his companion to go with him into another room where he had something to show her, and there, within a few minutes, he cut her throat from ear to ear. He soon came down, told what he had done, and made no attempt to escape. They had always been on good terms; no provocation, no motive whatever for the act was shown or suspected. When questioned, he replied only,--"I loved her, no one could tell how much I loved her." He had been drinking cider during the morning, but his cool and collected manner, both before and after the act, showed that he was not intoxicated. His employers testified that they had always found him good-natured and correct, but considered his intellect somewhat below the average grade. A few months subsequently he died in jail of consumption. Regarded from the ordinary moral stand-points, this was a strange, an unaccountable, a monstrous act, and we are unable to take the first step towards a solution of the mystery. Looking, however, at the material conditions of his affections, his propensities, his impulses,--his cerebral dynamics,--we get a clew, at least, to the secret. His father was an habitual drunkard, and a frequent inmate of the poor-house. He had two children,--one an idiot, and the other the prisoner; and the mental deficiency of the former, and the senseless impulses to crime manifested by the latter, were equally legitimate effects of the father's vice.--Here, again, is one who might justly be regarded as a favored son of fortune. Fine talents, a college-education, high social position, an honorable and lucrative business in prospect were all his; but before leaving college he had made considerable proficiency in lying, drinking, forgery, and hypocrisy, besides evincing a remarkable ingenuity in concealing these traits. His vices only increased with years, notwithstanding the various parental expedients to effect reform,--a voyage to sea, establishment in business, confinement in a hospital for the insane, a residence in the country, a settlement in a new territory. All this time his intellect was cool and clear, except when under the influence of drink, and he was always ready with the most plausible explanations of his conduct. At last, however, delusions began to appear, and unquestionable and incurable insanity was established. The philosophy of our times utterly fails to account for a phenomenon like this. Had the hand of the law been laid upon him for his offences, he would have been regarded as one of those examples of depravity which deserve the severest possible punishment; and when the true nature of his case appeared at last, doctors only wondered how so much mental disorder could happen to one whose progenitors were singularly free from mental infirmities. In