susceptible of the most extended signification; and we speak with equal correctness when we say the interval of a moment and of a thousand years. The time necessary to comprise a LUCID interval has not, to the best of my belief, been limited by me

dical writers or legal authorities; it must however comprehend a portion sufficient to satisfy the inquirer, that the individual, whose intellect had been disordered, does not any longer retain any of the symptoms that constituted his malady; and this presumes on the part of the examiner an intimate knowledge of the unfounded prejudices, delusions, or incapacities with which the mind of the party had been affected, and also deliberate and repeated investigations to ascertain that they are wholly effaced.

IMBECILITY.

There is another subject connected in a legal point of view with the nature of the human mind, and with the state of its morbid conditions, on which I respectfully solicit your Lordship's elucidation. In your Lordship's judgment of 1815, on the Portsmouth petition, it is laid down that "from the moment that (meaning this questionable and disputed unsoundness) had been established, down to this moment, it appears to me however to have been at the same time established, that whatever may be the degree of weakness or imbecility of the party,—whatever may be the de

gree of incapacity of the party to manage his own affairs, if the finding of the jury is only that he was of an extreme imbecility of mind, that he has an inability to manage his own affairs; if they will not proceed to infer from that, in their finding upon oath, that he is of unsound mind, they have not established by the result of the inquiry, a case upon which the Chancellor can make a grant, constituting a committee either of the person or estate. All the cases decide that mere imbecility will not do: that an inability to manage a man's affairs will not do, unless that inability and that incapacity to manage his affairs, AMOUNT to evidence that he is of unsound mind: and he must be found to be so."

A conclusion is here drawn that the establishment of unsoundness necessarily involves, that the extreme degree of imbecility and incapacity of mind does not constitute this unsoundness: that is,—they may exist in the extreme degree, (or citing the words employed,) in any degree WHATEVER, which implies the ne plus ultra, without any resulting UNSOUNDNESS. This is a dictum, which proceeding from your Lordship, the highest authority, is intitled to the utmost deference:—but it is not an

inference from any acknowledged premises, nor established by the intervention of any corroborating argument. The very existence of this intrinsic unsoundness, is "down to the present moment" unproved, and all that can be inferred in this state of the question, is the accredited maxim that

By the common consent of philosophers and physicians, mental imbecility in the extreme degree is termed idiotcy; and this state may exist "ex nativitate," or supervene at various periods of human life. When a child proceeds from infancy to adolescence, and from that state advances to maturity, with a capacity of acquiring progressively the knowledge which will enable him to conduct himself in society and to manage his affairs,—so that he is viewed as a responsible agent and considered "inter homines homo," such a being is regarded of sound capacity or intellect:—but if in his career from infancy to manhood it is clearly ascertained that education is hopeless,—that the seeds of