Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/104

Rh morbid, with a powerful bias toward unquestionable insanity. Passing along the streets it is easy to pick out people thus born: their faces and heads betray the unmistakable brand of incipient lunacy; and it requires but little provocation to fan the latent embers into a glowing and terrible flame. The average insane head is smaller in all its dimensions than the sane. The latter shows, also, less irregularity of outline. The left anterior quarter of the sane head is usually larger than the right, while the right anterior quarter of the insane head is almost always larger than the left. Many insane people show a decided projection in the right frontal region. Now mark the conduct of our friends thus organized.

LVIII. But why are they insane? What's the actual—not theoretic—but purely scientific facts of such cases? Reply: Magnetic and amative depletion act upon some people precisely as starvation acts upon everybody. When the stomach can no longer get food, the body begins to consume and feed upon itself; first it absorbs the fat, and we grow lean; then it attacks the muscles, and we become skeletons; next the liver goes, and we become cadaverous: their the mucous surfaces are called upon; and at last the serous plates are attacked, and the grave closes over a bunch of bones only. In the case of the sexual pederastic, Dentonian debauchee, when his lust alone drives him to either excess or sexive horrors, there is no return, and his passion consumes his body. First, the nerves become strained and tensioned beyond endurance, and one after another gives way; then the muscular cords are slackened: then the testicular glands decrease: then the prostate: then the marrow of the hack-bone softens and yields its fat to feed the fearful fire, creeping up till it reaches the brain; then the substance of the brain goes down to death's hot furnace; the soul shuts itself up, moodily waiting its time of flight, and when it acts at all is compelled to do so through diseased organs and perverted channels; hence, all it does is distorted, outre, queer, abnormal. The man is mad—and—let the curtain fall; the tragedy is ended.

LVIII. When teaching those who were desirous of mastering the principles pervading the books, and constituting the soul of the