woods, for persons engaged as upholsterers and cabinet-makers-and one lecture on oil, fats, soap, &c.

Now, if we substitute the employments of women for those of men, and consider what branches of science are the most serviceable in those employments, we at once arrive at the solution of the problem. First, there are certain subjects on which all women should be tolerably well instructed, such as, for example, sanitary science; the broad principles to be borne in mind in coping with disease, or for the maintenance of health; and so much knowledge of anatomy as will enable a woman to bind a wound, or palliate the effects of an accident until medical aid arrives. Such knowledge is obviously indispensable to all women, whether married or single, and its diffusion would save many valuable lives in the lower ranks of society. But now we come to trades and handicrafts. Of course, each town has its special industries, and the professional men, or employers of female labour in Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, and other large towns need not be told whether classes in chemistry, or metallurgy, or physics, would the best subserve educational purposes amongst their workpeople. But what is more obvious than that a number of girls employed in working the electric telegraph would be the gainers by having a sound knowledge of electricity; or that young showwomen or saleswomen in any trade whatever might with advantage be taught certain branches of physical science? A girl who is constantly asked by customers whether she has goods of this or that colour or texture, would surely be the better for knowing something of the laws of colour, or the history of textile fabrics; and it would certainly do her no harm if she were acquainted with the chemical processes whereby the beautiful dyes and pigments with which she is familiar are obtained, sometimes from waste products.

What we suggest, then, is that the promoters of this excellent movement should not content themselves with imparting science instruction to young ladies, and such females as can afford to pay two guineas for a course or half-a-crown for a single lecture, and who can devote the forenoon to the acquisition of such knowledge. They should open evening classes, in which instruction should be given to women of the industrial classes (in which are included shopwomen), and to female teachers in national and other schools. To these the charge for admission should be nominal, whilst the character of the instruction to be imparted should completely accord with the trade or vocation of the recipients.

V. ON IDIOCY.

By P. MARTIN DUNCAN, M.B. Lond., F.R.S., &c.

WHAT became of the idiots in the days of antiquity? Were there any amongst the early races of mankind? How is it that they are hardly mentioned by classical authors, and not noticed at all in Holy Writ? These are questions upon which those who are aware of the multitudes of idiots in the most highly civilized modern communities may speculate freely, but not very satisfactorily. The term idiot is of course Aristotelian. The existence of peculiar members of the human family who were "solitary" was known to the founder of that philosophy, and he clearly recognized the absence of the vie de relation amongst those he so well and aptly termed "dos" in kind. Children and adults who could not be communicated with, and who could not place themselves en rapport with others, were considered to be "solitaries;" they were beyond the sympathies, and were heedless of the love of the human race, and they were incapable of expressing the desire for or of seeking companionship. Probably Grecian idiots were very much akin to those of modern date in their deficiencies and peculiarities. They stared open-eyed by the hour, or they waved their hands about, beslavered their bodies, and wearied the beholder with automatic movements. They were as heedless of the weather as of the voice of authority, and they had neither reverence for the priest nor admiration for the goddesses or their living representatives. Alone amongst the multitudes, thoughtless amongst the philosophers, unloving when embraced, caring for no one, having neither friends nor foes, the "solitaries" of old were not unsurrounded by a faint atmosphere of sanctity even amongst the Greeks. They were unlike all other children when young, and could not be associated with in mental communion when old. They had no greed of gold; food they did not live for; luxury they were careless about; and of ambition they had none. The Helot might look upon the heedless solitary with slight respect, and call him a fool like a practical Anglo-Saxon; but his philosophic master, with his yearnings after the abstract and unknown, and with his dim misgivings concerning his own origin and future state, evidently associated the condition of his fellow-mortal with a mysterious and personal relation to the gods. He gilded the gingerbread humanity with a halo of sanctity, but the slave doomed to work did nothing of the sort. The men who recognized something more than a fiction in the myth of Prometheus gazed into the fixed eyes of the "solitaries" and speculated upon the possibility of the existence of an inward life of thought behind those dull orbs, and of a close affinity with the hidden intelligence of Zeus. Was there an Elysium within and a Tartarus

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clouding the without? Was there a curse which still could not extinguish the celestial fire? Bound with iron on the rock, torn by the everlasting bird, ever living, never dying. Thus with the type of organic life, was it thus in degree with the living example of a mindless body? There was no aberration evident to the thinkers of old in the "dos;" he was not chased by the Furies, but he was bound with invisible chains. Psyche was hidden, but the Satyr was free. The priesthood could but recognize some of the psychical conditions of the solitary in the exhausted and mentally collapsed state of the oracular virgins after prolonged religious excitement, and after the influence of the ritualistic therapeutics of the day had ceased to stimulate. These thoughts were probably common enough in a land where nature was luxuriant and where incessant toil was not requisite for existence. Farther to the east, where the struggle for life has never been great, there has been no hesitation in asserting that the idiot and the insane are under the especial care of the Deity; and amongst the followers of Mahomet the first of these has ever been looked upon with awe from the apparently willing self-exposure to the noonday sun, to the bitterest cold, and from the total disregard of consequences.

There is nothing in the cuneiform writing of the Babylonians nor in the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians to denote the existence of idiots during the time when those empires flourished; and it is very remarkable that there should not have been any notice of the idiotic state mentioned in the Book of Leviticus in the catalogue of those physical defects which were to prevent the priest from taking an active part in the ceremonial of the Tabernacle.

If misery, social degradation, and the free indulgence of the animal passions involve idiocy, there ought to have been plenty of it during the whole of the Roman Republic and Empire wherever the eagles rested. But there is much silence on the subject throughout the Latin authors. There were idiots in those days, and the practical Roman looked upon them as useless entities. They had no sanctity in his eyes, and hence their probable rarity. Doubtless the unfortunate children were neglected, and there is much reason for believing that they were "exposed." A congenital idiot soon begins to give trouble and to excite unusual attention; moreover, unless extra care is given to it, death is sure to ensue in early childhood. There are some very curious passages in the Latin classics that refer to the burial without cremation of very young children, and it is evident that although the laws against intramural sepulture were very stringent, there were instances where it took place surreptitiously. There is some reason for believing that many of the babies whose skeletons are now and then found close to Roman villas in this country and on the Continent had been buried there before teething had commenced, and that they

had died from a peculiar incapacity for receiving nourishment in the usual way. This defect is common enough in profound idiots. Under the most favourable circumstances the Roman infant had a sharp struggle for existence, and the amount of the mortality of the young may be estimated, if we leave the question of idiocy out, by the number of skeletons discovered in the "suggrundaria "— under the eaves and close to the walls of houses. At Chesterford no less than fifteen skeletons of infants were found close to the walls of a Roman villa discovered in 1852. The bodies were associated with a corresponding number of small vessels of Roman manufacture. It would seem that their parents had done all in their power by providing them with nourishment to soothe them and stop the crying, which Virgil, in the narrative of the descent of Æneas to Hades, in the 6th book of the Æneid, mentions thus:

"Vagitus et ingens,

Infantumque animæ flentes in limine primo."

The shades of the children were crying, and on the first threshold, that is just without the doors-an allusion no doubt to the place of their sepulture. The laws against intramural burial extended to the case of children who were subject to be buried in the cemeteries but not to be burned. Pliny tells us that children cut their teeth in the seventh month!!! and proceeds to inform us that it was not customary to burn their bodies before that time. Juvenal also describes the funeral of a child without fire

"Terra clauditur infans, et minor igne rogi."

Fulgentius says that baby bodies were not burned until they were forty days old. There is, then, some reason for believing that the interment laws were broken in the case of such children as were idiotic and still-born. These were buried quietly in the "suggrundaria."

Those idiots whom we call simpletons, and who are not really solitaries, but approach the lowest types of the perfect in mind, were doubtless common in those Roman families where there was wealth and freedom from the usual active competition with the world. Doubtless there was many a big Roman, solemn and staidlooking, who was studiously silent and dressed in the quietest toga, just as there are magnificent-looking men, but, oh, how simple, who now-a-days follow the wise precept of holding the tongue and wearing black. The range of mental deficiency, from the true solitary through those who are mimics and mischievous incapables, to the solemn and sometimes witty fool who just verges on the

* An admirable description of this discovery, from which I have quoted largely, is in the Trans. Essex Arch. Soc., 1858, by the late Lord Braybrooke.

most stupid of perfect mankind, was not noticed by the Roman alienist physicians.

There are no notices of idiots in the time of Arabian learning, when Europe was linked on to civilization by its clergy; and the affliction is never seen, so it is said, amongst the pure Arabs of the present day, who continue generation after generation to marry their uncles' daughters as a matter of course. This intermarriage occurs in many nations, living in what we call a very absurdly savage state, and yet idiots are either rare or absent amongst

them.

The history of idiocy is then to be written in a very small space, yet the condition is one of the greatest curses of modern times.

There are at least 10,000 pauper idiots in England and Wales, and there are 1760 idiots confined in workhouses and lunatic asylums in Ireland, but how many there are out of doors is unknown. In France there are 25 idiots born in every 1000 births. There are no statistics that can decide how many idiots there are in private families in Great Britain, but every alienist physician knows their number is legion. They are kept out of the way, shut up, being looked upon as a disgrace to the family, for people do not discriminate between the causes that give idiots to the drunken and reprobate, and those that induce idiocy in the families of the purest in mind and who lead the gentlest of lives. There is no greater trial in a family than the presence of an idiot child, for it not only attracts too much maternal care, but it affords, as it grows, a bad example to the other children. Supposing that there are two idiots born for every thousand of healthy children, what a mass of hidden suffering there must be around us for which there is hardly any relief.

The percentage of idiots increased in Ireland as the general population diminished after the famine and during the subsequent emigration; it is very large in France, whose population is at a standstill; it is great in North America, where the population is most mixed; and it is greater in those English counties where there is an agricultural population, earning poor wages and looking to the Union as their haven of rest, than in the others. In Herefordshire there were, a year or two since, 111 idiots (pauper) in 106,796 inhabitants, or I in 962; in Wiltshire, 237 pauper idiots in 236,027 inhabitants, or 1 in 995; in Berkshire, 200 pauper idiots in 205,625 inhabiants, or 1 in 1028; and in North Wales, there is a pauper idiot for every 906 souls. With these figures before us it is of no use hiding our national skeleton; the closet-door is opened every year during the census of pauperdom, and the grim fact constantly increases. Possessing what we call the highest civilization, we European and North American nations produce more useless children than those savages who have little or no civilization.