means of investigation and cure, but with equally indifferent success.
The patient sunk into deeper and deeper dejection, and died in the same
distress of mind in which he had spent the latter months of his life;
and his case remains a melancholy instance of the power of imagination
to kill the body, even when its fantastic terrors cannot overcome the
intellect, of the unfortunate persons who suffer under them. The
patient, in the present case, sunk under his malady; and the
circumstances of his singular disorder remaining concealed, he did not,
by his death and last illness, lose any of his well-merited reputation
for prudence and sagacity which had attended him during the whole course
of his life.

Having added these two remarkable instances to the general train of
similar facts quoted by Ferriar, Hibbert, and other writers who have
more recently considered the subject, there can, we think, be little
doubt of the proposition, that the external organs may, from various
causes, become so much deranged as to make false representations to the
mind; and that, in such cases, men, in the literal sense, really _see_
the empty and false forms and _hear_ the ideal sounds which, in a more
primitive state of society, are naturally enough referred to the action
of demons or disembodied spirits. In such unhappy cases the patient is
intellectually in the condition of a general whose spies have been
bribed by the enemy, and who must engage himself in the difficult and
delicate task of examining and correcting, by his own powers of
argument, the probability of the reports which are too inconsistent to
be trusted to.

But there is a corollary to this proposition, which is worthy of notice.
The same species of organic derangement which, as a continued habit of
his deranged vision, presented the subject of our last tale with the