mind is hurried away by an irresistible emotion of fear, for which no adequate external cause exists.

The organ is almost uniformly large in children, and appears, from this circumstance, to be developed at an earlier age than many of the other organs. This is a wise provision of nature, as caution is never more indispensable to the safety of the individual, than during the helpless years of infancy and childhood. Children possessing a large endowment may be safely trusted to take care of themselves; they will rarely be found in danger. When, on the other hand, the organs are small in a child, he will be a hapless infant; fifty keepers will not supply the place of the instinctive guardianship performed by adequate Cautiousness. In a boy of six years of age it was very small, and he took off his clothes to leap into an old quarry full of water to recover his cap, which the wind had blown into it, totally insensible to the danger, which was imminent, of being drowned. In some very young children, the organs are so prominent as to alarm mothers with the fear of disease or deformity. Water in the head indeed frequently shews itself by an enlargement of this part of the head, and it is not uncommon for unskilful persons to mistake a natural and healthy development of the organ in question, for an indication of this disease.

In mature age, when the organ is very deficient, the individual is rash and precipitate. He is never apprehensive about the results of his conduct, and often proceeds to act without due consideration. Persons of this description are frequently of a gay, careless disposition, and engrossed entirely with the present; they adopt rash resolutions, and enter upon hazardous enterprises, without deliberation or advice. In domestic life, misfortunes overtake them in consequence of their want of precaution. From constitutional recklessness, they precipitate themselves against objects in the dark; they break frangible articles, owing to want of precaution in arranging them; and lose the money which they lend, by omitting to take

proper security for repayment. Riding upon a slippery path, quite insensible to danger, their horse falls and deprives them of life. A cat, or other animal, overturns the candle which they have left burning, and sets their house on fire. In short, they are subject to interminable misfortunes, through want of caution in their conduct *.

This faculty produces a repressing influence, and, in estimating its effects, the faculties with which it is combined ought to be kept in view. An individual, with large Acquisitiveness and Self-Esteem, which produce instinctive selfishness, was pointed out to me as remarkably careful of his own interest, although the organ of Cautiousness was deficient in his head. It was admitted, however, that his prudence consisted chiefly in resisting solicitations to perform generous actions, and to enter into suretiship; but that, when a tempting prospect of gain was held out to him, although attended with great risk, he was liable to dash into the adventure, and in consequence frequently sustained severe losses. His natural dispositions rendered him little prone to excessive generosity, and in that respect no danger awaited him; but if Cautiousness had been large, it would have rendered him alive to the perils of speculation, and prompted him to prefer small and certain profits, to the chances of greater but uncertain gain.

Extreme and involuntary activity of this faculty produces internal sensations of dread and apprehension, highly distressing to the individual, although often very ridiculous in the eyes of ignorant spectators. Many persons believe that the feelings of the mind depend upon the dictates of the understanding, and that individuals, if they would allow themselves to be convinced of the groundlessness of their apprehensions, might, by an act of volition, remove these terrors. Such notions argue great ignorance of human nature. As easily could we remove a pain from the leg, by resolving to be quit of it, as the unhappy sufferer,

GALL sur les Fonctions du Cerveau, p. 319.

under diseased Cautiousness, could dispel the mental gloom by which he is afflicted.

A large development of this organ, combined with much Destructiveness, predisposes to self-destruction. Cautiousness does not produce suicide as a specific act, but the sentiment, when excited to excess by disease of the organs, gives rise to intense melancholy, anguish, and anxiety, and, by rendering life extremely miserable, indirectly prompts to this result. Hence the fact, that the best of men, and those in whose external circumstances no adequate motive can be found, are sometimes led to that fatal deed. Let no one suppose such an act done from mere error in judgment. It proceeds always from internal and involuntary feelings of a diseased nature, of the misery and torment of which, no man, who has never felt any thing similar, can form an adequate conception. The great ignorance of mankind in general, regarding the state of mind which predisposes to suicide, has arisen from the influence of the organs having been entirely overlooked, and the fact not being known, that disease in any of them deranges the character of the sane feeling which it serves to manifest, and often renders it independent of the will. Dr A. COMBE examined a considerable number of suicides in the Morgue at Paris, and found in them Hope generally small, with Cautiousness and Destructiveness large; and I have seen several similar examples.

Many instances of disease of this organ occur, not only in hospitals for the insane, but in private life. Dr GALL mentions, that, at Vienna, he attended two fathers of families in easy circumstances, who, nevertheless, were tormented night and day with the apprehension that their wives and children were exposed to die of hunger. The most earnest assurances of their friends were insufficient to make them comprehend that this fear was altogether chimerical. After their recovery, they could not bear to hear their condition mentioned, through terror of a relapse. Before their malady, they were known to be men of gloomy dispositions.

R

PINEL, under the head of Melancholy, mentions a variety of cases referrible to diseased Cautiousness. "A distinguished military officer," says he, "after fifty years of active service in the cavalry, was attacked with disease. It commenced by his experiencing vivid emotions from the slightest causes; if, for example, he heard any disease spoken of, he immediately believed himself to be attacked by it; if any one was mentioned as deranged in intellect, he imagined himself insane, and retired into his chamber full of melancholy thoughts and inquietude. Every thing became for him a subject of fear and alarm. If he entered into a house, he was afraid that the floor would fall, and precipitate him amidst its ruins. He could not pass a bridge without terror, unless impelled by the sentiment of honour for the purpose of fighting."

The forms in which this affection shews itself are numberless. It is in vain to address the understanding of the patient by argument, because the disease consists in a disordered state of a corporeal organ, and the only consequence of the most irresistible demonstration to the intellect, would be a change of the object of terror, but no alleviation of the feeling of painful apprehension itself.

Dr GALL mentions, that this organ is possessed in a high degree by those of the lower animals, which venture out only during night, as owls and bats, and also by those animals which place sentinels to warn them of approaching danger, as the wild goose, chamois, cranes, starlings and buzzards.

Among the lower animals, it is generally larger in females than in males; and Dr GALL mentions some curious facts, illustrative of the greater manifestation of the faculty by the former than by the latter. He happen

ed to kill, says he, as many as 20 squirrels, without finding a single female among them; although it was not the season in which they are confined by the care of their young. He caught, during three years, 44 cats in his garden, among which he found only 5 females. During one

winter 500 bears were killed in the two provinces of Virginia, among which only 2 females were discovered. An account of the wolves destroyed in France, from 1st January 1816 to 1st January 1817, was published officially by Count GERARDIN, Captain of the Royal Chace, and it shewed 1894 males, and only 522 females. Among the goats, the leader is always a female, and their safety, it will be recollected, arises from a high degree of circumspection. Among wild cattle, horses, and other animals who are defended by courage, the leader is uniformly a male, for in this sex, in general, Combativeness is larger. This fact, of females in general being more cautious than males, is corroborated by Captain FRANKLIN, in his Journey to the Arctic Regions. "It is extraordinary," says he, "that although I made inquiries extensively among the Indians, I met with but one who said that he had killed a she bear with young in the womb."

It has been remarked, in the way of criticism on these statements, that more males are produced by nature than females; which is quite correct; but this excess of males does not extend to the twentieth part of the difference in the number of their deaths by violence.

The metaphysicians do not treat of "fear," or of the instinctive tendency to avoid danger, as an original principle of the mind; but Dr THOMAS BROWN ranks melancholy among the primitive emotions, which is one of the effects of this faculty in a state of constant but not violent activity.

The organ is larger in the Germans, English, and Scots, than in the French; and it appears to be larger in the English than in the Turkish head. Mr FORSTER, a civil servant on the Madras Establishment, travelled overland from Bengal to England, in the year 1782, disguised as a Turk. In all the numberless scenes through which he passed, he had the address successfully to maintain his disguise, except in one single instance, in which he was detected by one individual, who was led to certainty in the discovery which he