e.

With these preliminary hints the paper promised is submitted to such as
may find any interest in them.

ACCOUNT OF A CASE OF GYNOPHOBIA.

WITH REMARKS.

Being the Substance of a Report to the Royal Academy of the Biological
Sciences by a Committee of that Institution.

"The singular nature of the case we are about to narrate and comment
upon will, we feel confident, arrest the attention of those who have
learned the great fact that Nature often throws the strongest light upon
her laws by the apparent exceptions and anomalies which from time
to time are observed. We have done with the lusus naturae of earlier
generations. We pay little attention to the stories of 'miracles,'
except so far as we receive them ready-made at the hands of the churches
which still hold to them. Not the less do we meet with strange and
surprising facts, which a century or two ago would have been handled by
the clergy and the courts, but today are calmly recorded and judged by
the best light our knowledge of the laws of life can throw upon them.
It must be owned that there are stories which we can hardly dispute,
so clear and full is the evidence in their support, which do,
notwithstanding, tax our faith and sometimes leave us sceptical in spite
of all the testimony which supports them.

"In this category many will be disposed to place the case we commend to
the candid attention of the Academy. If one were told that a young man,
a gentleman by birth and training, well formed, in apparently perfect
health, of agreeable physiognomy and manners, could not endure the
presence of the most attractive young woman, but was seized with deadly
terror and sudden collapse of all the powers of life, if he came into
her immediate presence; if it were added that this same young man did
not shrink from the presence of an old withered crone; that he had a
certain timid liking for little maidens who had not yet outgrown the
company of their dolls, the listener would be apt to smile, if he did
not laugh, at the absurdity of the fable. Surely, he would say, this
must be the fiction of some fanciful brain, the whim of some romancer,
the trick of some playwright. It would make a capital farce, this idea,
carried out. A young man slighting the lovely heroine of the little
comedy and making love to her grandmother! This would, of course, be
overstating the truth of the story, but to such a misinterpretation
the plain facts lend themselve