him, we have no doubt those supposed by others, and even by themselves, to enjoy extraordinary powers through the aid of charms and devils, may be numerous. It is hardly more than two hundred years, since dozens of poor old women were strangled and burnt in Scotland, to say nothing of what happened nearer home still, on such charges, to which, in many cases, they actually pleaded guilty. The ignorance of these Indians of everything connected with a superior state of civilization is something much more surprising, and especially when it is considered that they are only one day's journey and a half from the mission of Santa Catarina.' Lieutenant Hardy says, they imagined his vessel, as she sailed up the river, to be some large bird,' one of those unknown objects which their countryman, Montezuma, three centuries ago, considered as 'divine monsters,'

That float in air, and fly upon the seas.'

They have no domestic animals but dogs; and, to complete the picture of their misery and degradation, they sell their children to any one that will buy them for the merest trifle. Lieutenant Hardy bought one for a pocket-handkerchief-a proceeding of which few of his readers will approve, though he appears to have taken good care of it ere he quitted Mexico.

Whether this petty tribe on the Rio Colorado, so far removed from the capital and central parts of Mexico, were at any time in a better condition than at present, we have no means of judging but the Indians generally have good reason to lament the overthrow of the Spanish viceroyalty of Mexico. Under that particular government they were treated with much kindness, were suffered to live apart, and to work or to be idle as suited their inclinations, or to live in the midst of the Spanish and creole population. Here they formed the only industrious portion of the inha

See the admirable chapter on witchcraft in Baron Hume's Commentaries on the Criminal Law of Scotland. We may take this opportunity of noticing a very curious publication which is at present going on at Edinburgh under the auspices of the Bannatyne Club-(a club which has done more good in three or four years than the Roxburghe since its existence begun)-entitled 'Criminal Trials from the Records of the Court of Justiciary,' by Mr. Pitcairn. The witch trials during the reign of James VI., now for the first time given in detail, are among the most interesting materials of this collection, and well deserving of more than a passing notice. One of the most eminent of the practitioners executed during James's time, was Agnes Sampson, commonly called The wise wife of Keith,' who appears to have been a very tolerable poetess, if she composed that prayer and incantation for hailling of seik folkis,' for the use of which, inter alia, she was 'tane to the Castell-hill of Edinburgh, and thair bund to a stake, and wirreit (strangled) quhill sche was dead, and thaireftir her body brunt in assis,' in the year 1590. We insert her incantation :

6

All kindis of illis that ever may be, in Chrystis name I conjure ye;

I conjure ye, baith mair and less, by all the vertewes of the mess;
And rycht sa, by the naillis sa, that naillit Jesu, and na ma;
And rycht sa, by the samyn blude, that reikit owre the ruithful rood,
Furth of the flesh and of the bane, and in the erth and in the stane,

I conjure ye in Goddis name.'

bitants.

bitants. Indolence and gaming being the predominant vices of the creoles from the highest to the lowest, they were supplied with the necessaries of life by the manual labour of the Indians. These were the agriculturists, miners, fishermen, handicraftsmen, and domestic servants. Among those tribes which preferred to remain on their ancient territory, missionaries were established to instruct them in agriculture and the Christian religion; but the abstraction of the revenues by which these missions were supported, and the general impoverished state of the country, in consequence of the various revolutions and party contentions, have diminished greatly the former demand for the labour of the Indians; and these circumstances may explain the state of poverty and wretched ness in which Mr. Hardy found those of Rio Colorado.

The lieutenant, being at length happily released from a confinement of six-and-twenty days in this Rio Colorado, in which he sought in vain either for pearls or gold-dust, made the best of his way to Guaymas, in order to escape those terrible gales of wind, called cordonazos, which commence a few days before the equinox,

-a point in the ecliptic which, by some strange mistake, he makes to fall on the 21st of August (p. 387). Arriving at this port, and judging it to be a mere loss of money and time any longer to continue the fishery in the gulf of California, he prudently determined to sell one of his little vessels, and send the other to Acapulco for a freight. Thus ended all the Eldorado visions of The General Pearl and Coral Fishery Association of London.'

It cannot be denied that Mexico, and more especially a considerable portion of the industrious Indian population, have benefited by the money sent from this country by our speculators in mining, much more than the latter are ever likely to benefit themselves; at least, very little of the produce of the mines has yet been returned to this country in the shape of profits. We doubt indeed, -with the exception, perhaps, of the Bolanos mine—whether the produce will ever cover the capital already expended, the further sums required to be advanced, and the cost of the quicksilver which must be purchased and sent out, as absolutely necessary for the reduction of the ore. This influx of wealth into Mexico has not only given employment to many thousands of native creoles and Indians, in and about the mines, but has contributed mainly to restore the agricultural labour of the country, more particularly in the adjacent districts, encouraged commercial enterprise, and infused a general spirit of activity and industry among the people. Mexico, in fact, wants only a firm central government, composed of able and honest men, in which all the provincial governments should merge, to make it one of the most flourishing portions of America, capable as it is of producing every necessary and luxury of life for home consumption and expor

tation,

tation, and enjoying one of the most delightful and healthy climates on the face of the earth. But it will require time for the revolutionary elements to separate, subside, and settle into their proper places. The absurd invasion of Barrados will, undoubtedly, have a tendency to shorten the progress towards this state of harmony and prosperity.

ART. III.-1. Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms, and Treatment, Moral and Medical, of Insanity. By George Man Burrows, M.D., Member of the Royal College of Physicians of London, &c., &c. London. 1828.

2. Observation on Madness and Melancholy, including Practical Remarks on those Diseases, together with Cases, and the Morbid Appearances, on Dissection. Second Edition. London. 1809.

8vo.

OF practical works, which can be of use to the young physician

when consulted about cases of insanity, we have in English medical literature almost none. The book of Sir Alexander Crichton, though the production, obviously, of a man of understanding and reading, affords the young physician no assistance in his practical duties to his patient: the same may be said of Dr. Arnold's 'Observations on Insanity,' 1806; it is full of learning and metaphysics, but to the medical practitioner quite useless. There is a volume of cases by a Dr. Perfect, who many years ago kept a private madhouse somewhere in Kent; he has related the cases which he treated in his own house. Some practical information may be picked up out of this volume, but not much he used to give camphor sometimes in the dose of two scruples-a dose which Professor Christison of Edinburgh asserts is fatal. The Treatise on Madness,' by William Battie, M.D., is a quarto pamphlet in ninety-nine pages, and should be read as one of the few works of experienced physicians. We may say the same thing of the work of Dr. Munro: there is not much to be gleaned,-but an experienced man is always worth listening to; we would add, on practical subjects, nobody else.

We have now before us the last work of any practical value which has been written in England-Haslam's Observations on Madness and Melancholy. The first chapter of this book is on the definition of madness. In it we are informed that mad is originally Gothic, and meant rage-that it was spelt mod, but is now spelt mad, in proof of which we have a line from Chaucer's Knight's Tale. Then comes a passage from Beddoes, not worth extracting. Then we are told that delirium comes from de lira, out of the track-that crazy comes from the French écrasé, crushed,

crushed; whence, also, cracked. Next comes a little bit of metaphysics, in which it is laid down that there are no such faculties as imagination, judgment, reason, and memory; and why? because the language expressive of these faculties has been borrowed from external objects-thus, contrition comes from cum and tero: but you cannot rub one piece of the mind against another, therefore there is no such emotion as that which the deluded public call contrition. After a few such specimens, equally logical and conclusive, supported by a reference to Horne Tooke, and a criticism on Dugald Stewart, and Ihre's Glossarium Suio-gothicum (only think of placing such food before the student hungering and thirsting for practical knowledge)—we light upon a theory of conjunctions; then a stupid passage out of Paracelsus; then a witless sneer at the Rev. Dr. Willis; then we are informed that some believe that lunatics are possessed of a devil, and that Paracelsus says that a devil gets into a lunatic as a maggot gets into a filbert. Next we are indulged with a passage of several pages from the Breviary of Health of Andrew Boorde, alias Andreas Perforatus, who, we are told, is believed to have been physician to Henry VIII., but was certainly a fellow of the College-circumstances of obvious interest and importance in a treatise of practical instruction. Then follow sundry criticisms on Dr. Ferriar, who, we are assured, was a man of genius, learning, and taste; that he was possessed of a good deal of out-of-the-way reading is certain, and as to the other qualities, we grant him as much taste as a man without a spark of genius could have. The whole of this precious farrago is concluded by the favourite material of writers of insanity, some scraps of poetry.

If it be too much to expect that the writer should unplume himself of his reading and his whims, in the name of common sense let them be thrown into an appendix of notes, where he may delight his own vanity, and amuse the curiosity of the idle reader; but let them not be placed in the text, where they act as so many locks, in which the student, in pursuit only of useful information, is detained, to be hoisted up or lowered down, according to the level of the stream, and pay the heavy toll of time and tantalization, before he is launched again on the current of plain and instructive discourse.

Thus thirty-eight pages are filled-at the conclusion of which the poor anxious student knows about as much as he did at the beginning, touching the definition of insanity. Such writing as this is a fraud upon the reader; when he asks for bread, it is to give him a stone-it is, to use the expression of Jeremy Taylor, about the popular preachers of his day, to amuse him with gaudy tulips and useless daffodils, not with the bread of life and medicinal

plants

plants growing on the margin of the fountains of salvation.' Yet, notwithstanding all these imperfections, Dr. Haslam's work is one of the most valuable hitherto produced in this country, on a subject remarkable for the mediocrity of those who have written on it in all countries; and if the student can learn to skip his metaphysics, his etymologies, his extracts from obsolete books, and his poetry, he will find some really useful information on the symptoms of the disease, on its causes, its probable duration, its chances of cure, the mode of managing a patient with regard to liberty or confinement; and the value of the different medicinal remedies employed in the course of Dr. Haslam's own extensive practice.

Next in order we would mention the extraordinary volume of Mr. Nesse Hill: we never read such a one before, and are pretty sure we shall never read such another. It contains a few good cases at the end; a few remarks, the result of his own experience; a few good prescriptions; but nineteen-twentieths of the book are the most extraordinary piece of patchwork under which an unskilful author ever buried his mite of instruction. We do not believe twelve people ever read the book from beginning to end.

A third systematic work on insanity, produced by an English practitioner in mental diseases, is that bulky volume, entitled Commentaries on Insanity,' by George Man Burrows, M.D. The book is a wretched compilation of scraps, gathered from all sorts of sources, and full of inaccuracies, from quoting at secondhand, or from memory. This Dr. Burrows publicly acknowledged, but said the cause was, a thief had stolen his portfolio, which might have been a good reason for not publishing the book at all, but certainly can afford no apology for publishing it in this absurd and useless condition. The author, in truth, undertook a task to which his mind was totally unequal, having neither the accuracy and skill of the compiler, nor the talents of an original observer and thinker; it is lamentable that such a mass of trash should be in the hands of the English student of mental diseases, and go forth to foreign nations as a specimen of what the English mind is capable of effecting on such a subject.

The book which comes the nearest to what the English practical student is in want of, is entitled 'Outlines of Lectures on Mental Diseases,' by Alexander Morison, M. D. In its present state, however, it is a mere skeleton, and requires to be clothed with more detailed information—a task which we hope Dr. Morison will perform; nor, in as far as regards the selection of materials from the writings of others, can we offer him better advice better expressed than Van Helmont once gave to two students, who put to him the modest question how to attain certain truth, viz. :

'You