mind an air from the “Flûte enchantée.” “Were I as small as a snail, I would hide myself in my shell.” His moral hypersensibility was associated with physical hyperæsthesia. Noises of all kinds, such as the whistling of railway-trains, the cries of street-vendors, or the barking of dogs, excited extremely painful sensations. The least trace of light prevented him from sleeping at night. The unpleasant flavour of most drugs made it impossible for him to take medicine. He agreed thoroughly with the pessimistic philosophers who declare that the ills of life far surpass the good things. He required no experiments on the sense of taste to convince him. He believed that the organisation of his body prevented him from becoming adapted to external conditions and that he would have to disappear like the mammoth and the anthropoid apes. The course of his life confirmed the convictions of our pessimist. He had no private fortune and married a woman who became affected with tuberculosis, and so was confronted with the greatest evils of existence. A young lady, hitherto in good health, contracted influenza in some northern town. It was a mere nothing, said the doctors; influenza is everywhere and no one escapes it; after a little patience and rest, she will be well again. However the “influenza” persisted and brought with it feebleness and wasting. The doctors then found that there was a little dullness in the apex of the left lung, but as there was no bad family history, there was nothing to fear. I need not describe the familiar course of events. The trifling influenza was replaced by degeneration of the left lung, and brought death after four years of great suffering. Towards the end, when there was no hope, the patient found her only solace in morphine. Under the influence of that drug, she passed hours free from pain and in relative calm, but her excited imagination passed almost into hallucination.