their offspring, entailing a vast burden upon society, upon the taxpayers and upon the government. The mental condition of those condemned for capital offenses to either death or to life imprisonment, is an interesting one. It is not denied that many who are sane take the lives of their fellowmen; yet it is significant that among the "life men" in our prisons there is a very great proportion of insanity. The question arises as to whether in trials for such offenses the prisoner's soundness of mind was thoroughly investigated. It is true that the monotony of prison life and methods of discipline, the weight of a long sentence and remorse may have a tendency to develop insanity, and yet it can not altogether account for the wide prevalence of mental disease. In many cases the subsequent history shows that it must have been present when the act was committed. It is a fact that among "life men" insanity is exceedingly prevalent; out of 196 life convicts in the State of New York, thirty three, or 17 per cent, are inmates of the Matteawan State Hospital. As a rule their mental condition is either one of melancholia, with great dejection and depression of spirits, or a condition of mild mental disturbance attended with delusions of persecution. Many of them at the Matteawan State Hospital have now reached the stage of terminal dementia. This proportion would show a still larger percentage were it not for the fact that a few years ago, on account of overcrowding, and in order to create room for admissions, several such cases were pardoned and transferred to the custody of the county authorities, and by them committed to other State hospitals. As a class they are peculiar, and are superior mentally and physically to the average criminal. They are possessed of better morals, and naturally are freer from vicious propensities, and in many cases their misdeed was the single criminal act of their lives. A number of them were undoubtedly lunatics at the time of the commission of the acts for which they were convicted, but many of them become insane in prison, suffer from a hopeless regret for their crimes, and fall into quiet, subdued melancholia. The public appears to sanction the opinion, erroneously I believe, that insanity is frequently pleaded as a fraudulent defense for crime, particularly in capital offenses. In only an extremely limited sense this may be so to the extent that a few isolated instances may have occurred. On the contrary, insanity in all classes of criminals is too often overlooked, or when recognized the popu 315 lar desire is to hold them both sane and responsible. This is not a proper sentiment. Like the sequestration of contagious disease, the object sought should be the common welfare of the community. In the case of minor crimes, if it appears that the perpetrator is an imbecile, or what is popularly termed a "crank," let the grounds for such an opinion be stated in the commitment papers, and an order made forbidding his discharge so long as such conditions continue to exist. As it is now, a sentence definite as to a term of months or years seems to satisfy the people. The old idea of retributive justice prevails; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The populace is, and always has been, anxious for blood. If, however, a careful determination of each prisoner was undertaken with a view to his proper disposition or his commitment to some permanent and safe custody, so long as he was dangerous to society, many insane and pauper aliens illegally landed would be returned to foreign countries; many other habitual criminals now sent to prison or penitentiaries for short terms would be adjudged insane or even pronounced incurable by reason of natural defects, and the judge's order might so recite, thus practically committing the latter class for life to a hospital for the insane, and permanently ridding society of many dangerous and undesirable elements. DISCUSSION. Dr. E. N. BRUSH: In connection with one point touched upon, the importation of pauper insane, etc., it may be interesting to the gentlemen present to know that in New York State, June 1st, 1890, the census showed that almost exactly one-half of the insane are of foreign birth and, of the remaining one-half, nearly one-fourth are of foreign parentage. Of the 17,831 insane in 1890, 8,642 were of foreign birth. Dr. WALK, of Philadelphia: Defectives and insane are common amongst the wealthy classes as well as amongst the poor, but the wealthy classes take care that their defectives and insane do not get into trouble, whilst amongst the poor this care is not exercised and their defectives come into conflict with the civil authorities and they are sent to the prisons because there is no other place for them. In the Eastern Penitentiary perhaps 40 per cent of the inmates can be reckoned of this class of defectives; prisoners who come time and time again, are sent out into the community and are then re-arrested for some slight offense. COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS. BY R. M. BUCKE, M. D., Seventeen years ago I read at St. Louis my first paper before the Association and since then it has been my privilege to read several. All these, and all other original work done by me within the last twenty years, have dealt, directly or indirectly, (but generally directly) with one subject-namely-with mental evolution. In papers read in 1877 and 1878, and still more exhaustively in a volume published in 1879, I considered the evolution of the moral nature. In 1881 I read a paper on the evolution of the intellect and some of the sense functions, and in 1892 I dealt still further with these latter. I venture to draw your attention to these labors of mine because they have a direct bearing upon what I am to say to-day. The labor of twenty years has shown me clearly that the human mind has been slowly evolved by a species of unfolding or growth extending over millions of years. Not that the human mind has existed as long as that, but that the mind which we possess to-day in its human and its ante-human forms extends back for unknown ages and eons into the geologic past of the planet, sending its roots and drawing its sap to-day from the lives of tens of thousands of generations of our prehuman as well as human ancestors. And (it may be said in passing) it is apparently this almost infinite experience, treasured up and handed down the ages in the form of instincts-monitions of conscience and delicate phases of emotion-that gives to the human mind of the present time many of its most profound and subtle qualities. Be this as it may, the studies of the last twenty years have convinced me that the human mind as we know it to-day is a lineal descendant of a certain prehuman mind which could not have been very different from the mind of the higher animals of the present time and that this animal mind grew into the human mind by means of two closely related but distinct processes-first by the unfolding and expansion of its various faculties and second by the springing up within it from time to time of entirely new functions which in their turn unfolded and expanded as the generations and the centuries succeeded one another. My volume on Man's Moral Nature was intended to make clear whence proceeded and how from lower to higher planes advanced this important part of the human mind-my paper read in 1881 was intended as an exposition of the manner of growth of the intellect and that and another two years ago set forth reasons to believe in the addition from time to time of new faculties to the immense aggregate. The process is (in short), as I have before pointed out, precisely similar to that of evolution in all other departments-a tree, for instance, both sends out new branches and all its branches both new and old increase in size-a language (like the original Aryan or the Latin) puts out as its branches dialects which grow into languages and put forth others in their turn-a species either animal or plant puts forth as its branches varieties which grow into species and in their turn put forth other varieties which later also become species. Suppose then we admit (as I think we must) that far back in geologic time what we call mind had its origin in some very low organization in the form of mere excitability-that later on from this initial excitability was born sensation-from that again after many ages and generations and much experience simple consciousnessand again from that "when the time was ripe" self-consciousness— supposing we admit this to be a rough description of the trunk of our mental tree, then we have as its branches all the senses-each with its diverse and wide spreading congeries of functions-we have also as another vast trunk the moral nature, and as another still volition, without stopping to mention many another limb and twig of less consequence. The centre of all is of course the trunk and upon this I want to keep your minds fixed for the moment-that trunk resting upon and rooted in inorganic nature may be divided from the ground up (as before said) into: Vitality, Excitabilty, Sensation, Simple Consciousness, Self-Consciousness-these being superimposed the one upon the other in the order in which they are named. The line between simple consciousness and self-consciousness is, of course, the line between the brute and the man since self-consciousness is the basis of language, of human faculty in general and of the methods and arts that constitute objective human life. As vitality, excitability, sensation, simple consciousness and selfconsciousness each one arose, in its turn, from anterior conditions which prepared the way for it and made it possible, so every other faculty and function existing to-day had its own date of birth. For instance: The general sense of sight dates back many million years into geological time-the color sense only dates back about a thousand generations. The sense of hearing is very old—the musical sense is just coming into being. The animal instincts which are the basis of it go back far behind the carboniferous era, but anything we would to-day call a human moral nature is probably less than a hundred thousand years old. How do we know how long any given faculty has existed in any given race? Chiefly by three indications: 1st. The average age at which the faculty appears in the individual. 2d. The greater or less universality of the faculty in the members of the race as we see it at present. 3d. The readiness (or the reverse) with which the faculty is lost (as in sicknesses). For the sake of illustrating the position taken let us briefly compare almost any two faculties. Let us take for this purpose simple consciousness and self-consciousness. race. 1. Simple consciousness appears within a few hours or days of birth. Self-consciousness appears at about the age of three years. 2. Simple consciousness is absolutely universal in the human Self-consciousness is congenitally absent in all true idiots— i. e, in about one or two in every thousand individuals of the race. 3. Simple consciousness is only lost in the most profound disturbances as in epilepsy and coma and only for short periods, a few minutes, hours or days. Self-consciousness is always lost when simple consciousness is lost and over and above it is frequently lost as in the delirium of fever and in insanity (simple consciousness remaining present) and it often remains absent for days, weeks, even months. These three facts clearly show that simple consciousness is a much older faculty than is self-consciousness. But why is it that the older a faculty is in a race the earlier it shall be acquired by the members of the race? The answer is not far to seek and has a most important bearing upon the subject immediately under discussion-i. e, the existence or not of the new faculty in the race which I have named Cosmic Consciousness. It is briefly as follows: Suppose that a race is coming into possession of a new faculty-say self-consciousness, the moral human nature, |