"For a long time I have been thinking of giving up all idea of singing in public, and turning to medicine. Medicine is a fascinating study, and I'm sure I have a speciality that way. It runs in my blood; I was born with it. My celebrated ancestor, Louis Anne Lavirotte, born at Nolay, in the diocese of Autun, founded what I may call our house, in so far as it has been distinguished by familiarity with great cerebral questions. It is true that none of his immediate relatives has proved as great as he, but still several have devoted themselves to medicine, and several have made a mark in mental pathology. His 'Observations on Symptoms of Hydrophobia, following the Mania,' may not be the greatest work of the kind, but it deserves a prominent place on the shelves of anyone investigating this mysterious form of disease, which has baffled man from the earliest records down to now. "I think I am myself peculiarly qualified to take up inquiry into particular forms of mental callousness or intensity, for I have what I believe to be a peculiar faculty of thrusting forth a portion of my mind into certain and limited psychological regions, into which I can find no one able to follow me. "I have often thought that in these moments of uncontrollable, mental crassness, I am suffering from merely an undue prolongation of a portion of my mind into unfamiliar regions, where it is surrounded by isolated and combined images, invisible to others, and to me at normal times, and then and there illumined by lights and affected by considerations which have no place in my own normal state, or in the regard of others. "The question of the difference between mind and mind, between the sane and the insane, the man with a fad and the man with a delusion, the man with a hallucination and the idiot, admits of such subtleties of thought and delicacies of definition, that I know of nothing more fascinating to the psychologist. "The study of the sane mind is in itself an unexplored continent, of which only the coast line is known. But when we reach the region of insanity, we are on the confines of an unexplored universe, from which, as yet, no light has reached us but nebulous blurs of doubt. "Ay, upon the whole, I think it would be better to abandon all thought of the glitter and glory of the stage, which is but the glitter and glory compassable within four walls built by human hands. Whereas, the glories of research in mental pathology are as infinite as the flight of thought itself, as incompassable as the fields of reason.