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 FAITH AND MENTAL INSTABILITY

, M.D.

The Tendency for Insanity to increase on Account of the Stress of Life.

That there is a tendency for insanity to increase on account of the stress of competition and all the complexities of modern civilisation few will deny. The burden of taxation upon the nerve tissues and the drain upon their stores of energy must necessarily go on increasing as the uses for the physical mechanism of the body and limbs diminish and become replaced by the more complex nervous activities essential to brain and mental avocations. The influences of rural and urban life, trades and occupations, &c., as favouring the occurrence of insanity, have been dealt with in an exhaustive manner in various reports, treatises, and innumerable papers, and the result has been to apprise us of the fact that the percentage of individuals who are incapable by reason of mental perversion or defect from