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Royal Agricultural Society have shown before now the value of careful and accurate testing of motors and machines capable of actual trial, and they could also testify how costly and how carefully conducted such trials must be if they are to be of actual use.

It will be allowed, therefore, that the honest discharge of jury work is beset with difficulties. And all the work is not honest. Illegitimate influence of every sort is but too often brought to bear on all who have it in their power to advance the claims of some of the competitors. I believe that in the great exhibitions such influences have rarely had much success, but in those of the second class favouritism, to use no stronger term, has been far too common. This part of the subject is not pleasant. Let it suffice to say that, if the public will regard with suspicion-or rather treat as of no value-any awards but those made at exhibitions under the highest authority, no great injustice will be done to anybody.

It is very possible that the multiplication of prize medals, and the doubtful value of any but those of the highest class, may before very long put an end to the system, though from what has been said above it may be judged that there are not at present many signs of such a tendency. Some there are. Many firms decline to exhibit, and are not to be tempted by such baits. The chances are that they are losers. Medals apart, the profits gained by exhibitors from increased trade are generally considerable. Any exhibitor who can make and sell articles-especially articles of food-will drive a roaring trade. Even manufacturers of heavy goods are tolerably certain to cover their expenses, unless these expenses are on a very lavish scale indeed.

The future of exhibitions, at all events in this country, cannot fail to be very greatly affected by the foundation of the Imperial Institute suggested by the Prince of Wales, since, whatever may be the eventual nature of the Institute, it is certain to fulfil, at all events in great part, the functions of an exhibition. The precise character of the Institute is not yet known. If it is to take the high place among English institutions which is evidently intended by its royal founder, this much may safely be said that it must be permitted to develop itself gradually, to attain completion by a certain process of evolution. Experience does not teach us to expect success for institutions, however promisingly conceived, which are launched complete into existence. Gradual growth would appear to be an almost necessary condition of permanence in the political as in the physical world.

The ablest councils and the fullest experience are at the command of its founder, and it cannot be doubted that the constitution for the new Institute will be drafted in the wisest, the most judicious manner possible. May it be permitted to express a hope that it will not be too complete, that it will be to the utmost possible extent elastic,

that it will permit of growth in every imaginable direction, and even in directions not now imaginable? Not the wisest of us can forecast the future development of any human institution. Is it not therefore well to leave the influences of the future, untrammelled by restrictions now apparently desirable, but perhaps unfitted to the changed conditions of half a generation onward, to mould that development for itself? To give examples of institutions that have profited by freedom or suffered by restrictive conditions would be a task not less easy than invidious. Perhaps the moral may be accepted without the need for an instance, and may serve as a contribution to the discussion from the opposite side to that of those who ask that a fully completed scheme may be submitted before their adhesion to a large and liberal project is to be expected.

The object of the Institute is defined with perfect clearness in the letter addressed to the Lord Mayor, in which his Royal Highness gave publicity to his proposal: the encouragement of the arts, manufactures, and commerce of the Empire. The means by which this end is to be attained is the question. Some suggest themselves obviously enough. Of these, the first is a Museum or collection of Colonial and Indian products. The proposal for a Colonial Museum has several times been put forward, and could not fail to suggest itself as the outcome of the magnificent collection now at South Kensington. From the British Museum at one end of the list to the International Exhibition at the other end, there are many grades. What precise place should be occupied by the Imperial Institute is a matter which has been a good deal discussed, and will be discussed a good deal more. Those who would yield something to the popular demand for a place of amusement might fairly urge that the gardens at Kew detract nothing from the value of the botanical collections there, or those of the Luxembourg from the character of the adjoining galleries. However, be this as it may, it may fairly be assumed that part of the Institute will consist of a Colonial Museum, in which the natural products, the physical characteristics, the arts and the manufactures of the Colonies will be fully represented. If it be found possible to relegate specimens of purely scientific value to their places in such collections as the Natural History Museum, Kew Gardens, or the Museum of the Pharmaceutical Society, the purposes of the scientific student will be better served, without the value of the general Colonial collection being greatly lessened.

As regards the discussion of Colonial matters, whether political, commercial, or scientific, doubts must suggest themselves whether it will be found practicable to carry on in what will really be a State institution such full and free controversy as alone can be of value. Possibly on investigation it may be found best to leave this work in the hands of private, and therefore independent, bodies. To the provision of popular lectures, of a character to diffuse useful

information about the Colonies throughout the country, no such exception can be taken, and if such lectures could be delivered in the courts of the museum amongst the objects to which they would relate, it would be so much the better. Means for the examination and analysis of colonial produce; an organisation for the introduction of all such produce to the English market; a system for informing the English buyer what the colonist has to sell, and for teaching the colonist what the English trader desires to buy; a central office where information could be procurable by would-be emigrants-these and such objects suggest themselves among the first for consideration in elaborating a scheme for the new institution.

If in the fulness of years its success and wealth justify its extension, so that it may include the mother-country as well as her dependencies, and become a great trade museum for the illustration of the arts, manufactures, and commerce of the whole Empire, the new Institute will fulfil a worthier function still.

Such a development cannot be expected even in the immediate future, perhaps never. In the meantime it only remains to hope that the utmost care and thought will be devoted to the elaboration of a constitution for the Institute. Wisely established and prudently administered, it ought to be a fresh source of strength to the Union. Hastily set up, and managed without the greatest judgment, the very importance of the foundation could not fail to make it a most potent instrument for mischief.

H. TRUEMAN WOOD. (Secretary to the Society of Arts

MULTIPLEX PERSONALITY.

Οσσον γ' ἀλλοῖοι μετέφυν, τόσον ἄρ σφισιν αἰεὶ

καὶ τὸ φρονεῖν ἀλλοῖα παρίστατο.

EMPEDOCLES.

I PURPOSE in this paper briefly to suggest certain topics for reflection, topics which will need to be more fully worked out elsewhere. My theme is the multiplex and mutable character of that which we know as the Personality of man, and the practical advantage which we may gain by discerning and working upon this as yet unrecognised modifiability. I shall begin by citing a few examples of hysterical transfer, of morbid disintegration; I shall then show that these spontaneous readjustments of man's being are not all of them pathological or retrogressive; nay, that the familiar changes of sleep and waking contain the hint of further alternations which may be beneficially acquired. And, lastly, I shall point out that we can already by artificial means induce and regulate some central nervous changes which effect physical and moral good; changes which may be more restorative than sleep, more rapid than education. Here, I shall urge, is an avenue open at once to scientific and to philanthropic endeavour, a hope which hangs neither on fable nor on fancy, but is based on actual experience and consists with rational conceptions of the genesis and evolution of man.

I begin, then, with one or two examples of the pitch to which the dissociation of memories, faculties, sensibilities may be carried, without resulting in mere insane chaos, mere demented oblivion. These cases as yet are few in number. It is only of late years-and it is mainly in France-that savants have recorded with due care those psychical lessons, deeper than any art of our own can teach us, which natural anomalies and aberrant instances afford.

Pre-eminent among the priceless living documents which nature thus offers to our study stand the singular personages known as Louis V. and Félida X. Félida's name at least is probably familiar to most of my readers; but Louis V.'s case is little known, and although some account of it has already been given in English,' it will be needful to recall certain particulars in order to introduce the speculations which follow.

Journal of Mental Science for January 1886. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, part x. 1886 (Trübner & Co.).

Louis V. began life (in 1863) as the neglected child of a turbulent mother. He was sent to a reformatory at ten years old, and there showed himself, as he has always done when his organisation has given him a chance, quiet, well-behaved, and obedient. Then at fourteen years old he had a great fright from a viper-a fright which threw him off his balance and started the series of psychical oscillations on which he has been tossed ever since. At first the symptoms were only physical, epilepsy and hysterical paralysis of the legs; and at the asylum of Bonneval, whither he was next sent, he worked at tailoring steadily for a couple of months. Then suddenly he had a hystero-epileptic attack-fifty hours of convulsions and ecstasy-and when he awoke from it he was no longer paralysed, no longer acquainted with tailoring, and no longer virtuous. His memory was set back, so to say, to the moment of the viper's appearance, and he could remember nothing since. His character had become violent, greedy, and quarrelsome, and his tastes were radically changed. For instance, though he had before the attack been a total abstainer, he now not only drank his own wine but stole the wine of the other patients. He escaped from Bonneval, and after a few turbulent years, tracked by his occasional relapses into hospital or madhouse, he turned up once more at the Rochefort asylum in the character of a private of marines, convicted of theft but considered to be of unsound mind. And at Rochefort and La Rochelle, by great good fortune, he fell into the hands of three physicians— Professors Bourm and Burot, and Dr. Mabille-able and willing to continue and extend the observations which Dr. Camuset at Bonneval and Dr. Jules Voisin at Bicêtre had already made on this most precious of mauvais sujets at earlier points in his chequered career.2

He is now no longer at Rochefort, and Dr. Burot informs me that his health has much improved, and that his peculiarities have in great part disappeared. I must, however, for clearness' sake, use the present tense in briefly describing his condition at the time when the long series of experiments were made.

The state into which he has gravitated is a very unpleasing one. There is paralysis and insensibility of the right side, and (as is often the case in right hemiplegia) the speech is indistinct and difficult. Nevertheless he is constantly haranguing any one who will listen to him, abusing his physicians, or preaching, with a monkey-like impudence rather than with reasoned clearness, radicalism in politics and atheism in religion. He makes bad jokes, and if any one pleases him he endeavours to caress him. He remembers recent events

2 For Dr. Camuset's account see Annales Médico-Pyschologiques, 1882, p. 75; for Dr. Voisin's, Archives de Névrologie, Sept. 1885. The observations at Rochefort have been carefully recorded by Dr. Berjon, La Grande Hystérie chez l'Homme, Paris, 1886. The subject was again discussed at the recent meeting (Nancy, Aug. 1886) of the French Association for the Advancement of Science, when Professor Burot promised a longer treatise on the subject.

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