“O, that way madness lies; let me shun that.” It is possible, however, that this very opinion may be a fixed idea or symptomatic eccentricity of the alienist himself. The theory that all men are monomaniacs may be merely his peculiar monomania. Still there is unquestionably this much truth in it, that nearly every person has developed some faculty at the expense of the others and thus destroyed his mental equilibrium. Every tendency of this kind, which is not checked or balanced and in some way rounded off in the growth of the character, becomes morbidly strong and leads to a sort of insanity. The specialist is always exposed to this danger of growing into a man of one idea; his monomania may be in the direction of valuable research or in the pursuit of a foolish whim, resulting in useful inventions or dissipating itself in chimerical projects; it may be a harmless crotchet or a vicious proclivity, philanthropic or misanthropic; it is, nevertheless, a bent or bias and so far a deviation from the norm of perfect intellectual rectitude. A madman, says Coleridge, is one who “mistakes his thoughts for person and things.” But here the frenzies of the lunatic intrench on the functions of the poet, who “of imagination all compact,” takes his fancies for realities, “Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.” Coleridge’s definition includes also the mythopœic faculty, the power of projecting creations of the mind and endowing them with objective actuality and independent existence, which in the infancy of the race peopled heaven and earth with phantasms, and still croons over cradles and babbles of brownie and fairy in nurseries and chimney-corners. No progress of science can wholly eradicate this tendency to mythologize. In the absence of better material, it seizes upon the most prosaic and practical improvements in modern household life and clothes them with poetry and legend. The imaginative child of New York or Boston, after feeding the mind on fairy tales, converts the ordinary gas-pipe into the den of a dragon, which puts forth its fiery tongue when the knob is turned. The sleeping figure of a virgin carved in marble and copied from an ancient Greek sculpture of Ariadne, which reposes on an arch in the park of Sans-souci at Potsdam, has been transformed by the popular imagination into an enchanted princess, who will awake as soon as a horseman succeeds in springing over it three times with his steed. So vivid is the belief in this story that many good Christians never pass through the archway without making the sign of the cross as a prophylactic against possible demonic influences. The Suabian peasant still believes that the railroad is a device of the devil, who is entitled by contract to a tollage of one passenger on every train; he is in a constant state of anxiety lest his turn may come on the next trip and always wears a crucifix as the best