the cord which
supported one of its heavy leaden weights broke, and the weight came
crashing down to the bottom of the case. Some effect must have been
produced upon the pulpy nerve centres from which they never recovered.
Why should not this happen, when we know that a sudden mental shock may
be the cause of insanity? The doctor remembered the verse of "The
Ancient Mariner:"

"I moved my lips; the pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit;
The holy hermit raised his eyes
And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars; the pilot's boy,
Who now doth crazy go,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro."

This is only poetry, it is true, but the poet borrowed the description
from nature, and the records of our asylums could furnish many cases
where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.

More than this, hardly a year passes that we do not read of some person,
a child commonly, killed outright by terror,--scared to death, literally.
Sad cases they often are, in which, nothing but a surprise being
intended, the shock has instantly arrested the movements on which life
depends. If a mere instantaneous impression can produce effects like
these, such an impression might of course be followed by consequences
less fatal or formidable, but yet serious in their nature. If here and
there a person is killed, as if by lightning, by a sudden startling sight
or sound, there must be more numerous cases in which a terrible shock is
produced by similar apparently insignificant causes,--a shock which falls
short of overthrowing the reason and does not destroy life, yet leaves a
lasting effect upon the subject of it.

This point, then, was settled in the mind of Dr. Butts, namely, that, as
a violent emotion caused by a sudden shock can kill or craze a human
being, there is no perversion of the faculties, no prejudice, no change
of taste or temper, no eccentricity, no antipathy, which such a cause may
not rationally account for. He would not be surprised, he said to
himself, to find that some early alarm, like that which was experienced
by Peter the Great or that which happened to Pascal, had broken some
spring in this young man's nature, or so changed its mode of action as to
account for the exceptional remoteness of his way of life. But how could
any conceivable antipathy be so comprehensive as to keep a young man
aloof from all the world, and make a hermit of him? He did not hate the
human r