s will it not be the possessor! By degrees, the extreme
quickness of intellect becomes less remarkable; but the body begins to
increase in robustness; and a year will sometimes suffice to transmute
the little fairy, so quick, so clever, but so fragile, into a very
commonplace, merry, rosy, romping child. I may add that it is well to
bear in mind the converse of this; to remember that body and mind
rarely grow in equal proportion at one time; that the incorrigible
little dunce, though not likely to prove a genius as he grows older,
will yet very probably be found at twelve or fourteen to know as much as
his playmates. A dull mind, and a sickly or ill-developed frame may make
us anxious: but if the physical development is good, the mind will not
be likely to remain long below the average standard.

But sometimes, the over-tasked mind leads to mischief which Nature
cannot rectify; an attack of water on the brain destroys the child, or
if not it sinks under almost any accidental disease. In other instances
neither of these results takes place, but the whole nervous system seems
profoundly shaken, and the moral character of the child seriously, and
even permanently injured. I remember a quick and clever little girl aged
five and a half years who was urged on by her governess to work which
she delighted in, till at length the signs of over-taxed brain showed
themselves in frequent extreme irritability, and occasional attacks of
causeless fury amounting almost to madness. It was fully a year during
which almost all mental work was suspended, while the child was sent to
have complete change under most judicious management in the country,
before her mind quite recovered its balance and she became able to
resume her studies in a very moderate degree.

Cases such as this are instances of the slightest degree of a condition
which if not remedied may pass into confirmed insanity. I believe the
gradations to be almost imperceptible by which the one state passes into
the other; and I have known instances in which the ungovernable temper
and occasional fury of the child have passed in youth into abiding
insanity which rendered the patient the inmate, and I fear the permanent
inmate, of a lunatic asylum.

In whatever circumstances insanity comes on in childhood, and it does
sometimes, though very seldom, come on independently of any obvious
exciting cause, it always assumes the character of what has been termed
moral insanity, or of t