others address to them.  They always keep apart, and never communicate with one another.  An extremely curious fact which has been frequently noted by the superintendents of their section of the hospital, and by myself, is this:  From time to time, at very irregular intervals of two, three, and many months, without appreciable cause, and by the purely spontaneous effect of their illness, a very marked change takes place in the condition of the two brothers.  Both of them, at the same time, and often on the same day, rouse themselves from their habitual stupor and prostration; they make the same complaints, and they come of their own accord to the physician, with an urgent request to be liberated.  I have seen this strange thing occur, even when they were some miles apart, the one being at Bicetre, and the other living at Saint-Anne.”

I sent a copy of this passage to the principal authorities among the physicians to the insane in England, asking if they had ever witnessed any similar case.  In reply, I have received three noteworthy instances, but none to be compared in their exact parallelism with that just given.  The details of these three cases are painful, and it is not necessary to my general purpose that I should further allude to them.

There is another curious French case of insanity in twins, which was pointed out to me by Sir James Paget, described by Dr. Baume in the Annales M. edico-Psychologiques, 4 serie, vol. i., 1863, p. 312, of which the following is an abstract.  The original contains a few more details, but is too long to quote:  Francois and Martin, fifty years of age, worked as railroad contractors between Quimper and Chateaulin.  Martin had twice slight attacks of insanity.  On January 15 a box was robbed in which the twins had deposited their savings.  On the night of January 23-24 both Francois (who lodged at Quimper) and Martin (who lived with his wife and children at St. Lorette, two leagues from Quimper) had the same dream at the same hour, three a.m., and both awoke with a violent start, calling out, “I have caught the thief!  I have caught the thief! they are doing mischief to my brother!” They were both of them extremely agitated, and gave way to similar extravagances, dancing and leaping.

Martin sprang on his grandchild, declaring that he was the thief, and would have strangled him if he had not been prevented; he then became steadily worse, complained of violent pains in his head, went out of doors on some excuse, and tried to drown himself in the river Steir, but was forcibly stopped by his son, who had watched and followed him.  He was then taken to an asylum by gendarmes, where he died in three hours.  Francois, on his part, calmed down on the morning of the 24th, and employed the day in inquiring about the robbery.  By a strange chance, he crossed his brother’s path at the moment when the latter was struggling with the gendarmes; then he himself became maddened, giving way to extravagant gestures and using incoherent language (similar to that of his brother).  He then asked to be bled, which was done, and afterwards, declaring himself to be better, went out on the pretext of executing some commission, but really to drown himself in the River Steir, which he actually did, at the very spot where Martin had attempted to do the same thing a few hours previously.