The movements are highly variable in type and degree, nor can the mother specify the date of their appearance. It is only during the last three years that her attention has been more particularly drawn to them, and their increasing gravity occasions her some anxiety. The boy has become the laughing-stock of his companions at school, hence he limits his stay there to the actual hours of his classes. Three years later the choreic symptoms vanished. X. is to-day a stalwart youth, though still timid and eccentric. It is evident that in his case the variable chorea has been but an episode in adolescence, to be added to the numerous stigmata of degeneration enumerated above. Notwithstanding its slow evolution (says Brissaud), the neurosis, in so far as it was a disorder of motility, seems to have completely disappeared. The importance of this for prognosis is fundamental, but from the point of view of diagnosis it is no less significant, seeing that the nature and form of the movements suggested chronic or Huntington's chorea. A case described by Gilles de la Tourette[139] as disease of the tics seems really to have been one of variable chorea. A woman of twenty-two, who had never been very strong, had an attack, at eight years, of involuntary movements of face and arms which prevented her feeding herself, and at the hospital a diagnosis of chorea was made. Two months later cessation of the movements allowed of her return to school, but a second attack followed after two years, and a third a year later. At the time of observation she was in the throes of her sixth relapse. Every one who had seen her considered the condition as chorea. Tourette, however, was dissatisfied with the diagnosis. There was no suggestion of its being Sydenham's chorea, or hysterical chorea, still less of its belonging to Huntington's variety. According to the author, the muscular twitches were amorphous and indefinite, and characterised by extreme variability in form, expression, and intensity. In our opinion the clinical picture is that of variable chorea, and we are confirmed in our opinion by a consideration of the patient's mental condition. She comes of a pronounced neuropathic stock. One of her two sisters is nervous and impressionable, and probably a neurasthenic, while the other is subject to hysterical attacks. She herself is of a profoundly nervous temperament; she cannot go to bed without assuring herself several times that no one is concealed beneath it; she suffers from fears and dreads and obsessions of all sorts; she is, in fact, an "unstable," a degenerate. In one of our patients the symptoms were unilateral, constituting a variable hemichorea.