of progression, some catastrophe will inevitably happen, to which those we have already experienced. will be as nothing. It immediately suggests itself. that the difficulties attending these monster trains may be avoided by breaking them up into two or three trains; but this would only be to multiply the chances of danger, unless the intervals between the starting times were amply sufficient to prevent the chance of their overtaking each other. But even then the auxiliary aid of the telegraph would be needed, in order to insure the safe passage of a quick succession of trains, treading upon each other's heels as it were. The frightful accident that happened to an excursion train on the Lynn and Hunstanton Railway, by which five persons were killed and five-andtwenty more or less wounded, was an example in point. It appears that one of these excursion trains was started a quarter of an hour only after the other; the first train passed a bullock on the line, but the driver seemed to take no notice of it; at all events, he did not inform the station-master of the next station he arrived at; consequently no warning was given by telegraph to the on-coming train. The result of this was, that a collision with the beast threw the carriages off the line, and unfortunately it was not in this case the worse for the "coo" only, as old Stephenson predicted would be the case under such circumstances, but for the poor excursionists also. Perhaps, after all, the most efficacious means of correcting the delays and inconveniences that are caused by these excursion trains, which interfere so greatly with the ordinary

traffic of the line, would be to make arrangements for their being started at a separate platform and siding, which should be provided at the railway terminus, entirely independent of that used for the ordinary traffic of the station, as well as for the employment of a staff of clerks, police, and porters, who should be specially told off for this particular work. If this were done, and a sufficient telegraphic communication were kept up between train and train, it seems to us that the danger and the nuisance which confessedly arise from the system of excursion trains would be very much abated, though not perhaps entirely removed. It is quite clear that, as things are at present managed, Sunday excursion trains are by far safer than those that run during the week, inasmuch as they have the rails comparatively to themselves on that day. And this, so far as we can see, is a very practical argument against the entire abolition of those Sunday excursion trains.

EARLY WARNINGS.

THE spirit of man is ever busy pushing his investigations farther and farther into the secret workings of Nature-step by step he is tracking her into her inmost recesses; and if he despairs of ever reaching the final cause of things, he at least is rewarded by the ample knowledge and subtle beauty he finds on the way. Before the microscope was discovered, what realms lay unknown at his feet! The mind has no microscope, it is true, by which immaterial things can be tracked upwards to their source; but its penetrative powers grow vastly subtle by the habit of concentrating them upon any particular study, and the merest trifle to the educated eye assumes proportions not to be estimated by the superficial observer. We remember hearing it said of the late Dr. Marshall Hall, that he could not bring his acute and persistent mind to bear upon a gooseberry without finding out some fact and deducing some great truth from it that had never struck any person before. Of late years the science of mind, healthy and diseased, has been placed, as it were, in the field of the intellectual microscope, and since the appearance of Dr. Abercrombie's "Inquiries

Concerning the Intellectual Powers," which created such a profound sensation thirty years ago, numerous investigators have been engaged in following up the clue he placed in their hands. That there is an immense amount of latent brain disease in the community, only awaiting a sufficient exciting cause to make itself patent to the world, there can be no manner of doubt. In the Annual Reports of our Lunatic Asylums, we see tables of the causes of the insanity of the inmates, which would lead the public to believe that certain powerful emotions were sufficient to disorganize the material instrument of thought: thus we find love and religion figuring for a very large proportion of the lunacy in our asylums, whilst a fire, a quarrel with a friend, are set down as the causes which precipitate an individual from a state of sanity to madness. We do not mean to say that any sound psychologist imagines that these causes are anything more than proximate ones, but the public, and possibly medical men little versed in mental alienation, seem to think that a healthy mind can be suddenly dethroned by some specific emotion, just as a healthy body may be suddenly prostrated by fever. There is, in fact, no such thing as sudden insanity, or at least it is of the rarest possible occurrence. Coroners' juries may imagine that a person who has committed suicide became insane only at the moment of inserting his neck in the fatal noose, but every one who has studied the human mind must be aware that it is not constituted like a piece of castiron, which snaps suddenly under the influence of a

sudden frost. The grey fabric of the brain, before it gives way, always affords notable signs, easily capable of being read by an accomplished physician, of a departure from a state of health.

It often happens that impending lunacy is known to individuals themselves long before any sign is made to others. There is a terrible stage of consciousness, in which, unknown to any other human being, an individual keeps up, as it were, a terrible hand-to-hand conflict with himself, when he is prompted by an inward voice to use disgusting words which in his soul he loathes and abhors: these voices will sometimes suggest ideas which are diametrically opposed to the sober dictates of his conscience. In such conditions of mind prayers are turned into curses, and the chastest into the most libidinous thoughts. It does not necessarily follow, because a man is thus haunted by another and evilly-disposed self, that he has reached the stage of lunacy, if his reason still retains the mastery. It is said that Bishop Butler waged, for the greater part of his life, a hidden warfare of this kind; and yet no one ever suspected him of unsoundness of mind. It is indeed strange what wayward and erratic turns the mind will take even in robust health. For instance, every one must have felt the difficulty now and then of suppressing the inclination to cry out in church, or to prevent the rebellious muscles of the face from expressing a smile on occasions when the utmost gravity of demeanour is called for. Again, we are often haunted by an air of music, or some voice will repeat itself with such