bific power of the emotions and passions is
found in the frequent occurrence of _psychopathitis_ in times when all
the elements of social life are in a state of fermentation. In and after
revolutions sudden changes of fortune produce a thousand cases of mental
disorder.

The very same disease broke out among the Romanists themselves, at Port
Royal, in 1729. In the previous century it had thrown whole nunneries
near Bordeaux into wild confusion. In the sixteenth century it was known
in Italy as the "Dancing Mania," or Tarantism. At the close of the
fifteenth century _Tarantism_ had spread beyond the borders of Apulia. *
* * The number of those affected by it increased beyond all belief.
Inquisitive females joined the throng and caught the disease from the
mental poison which they eagerly received _through the eye_. * * *
Foreigners of every color and race were, in like manner, affected by it.
Neither youth nor age afforded any protection; so that even old men of
ninety threw aside their crutches, and joined the most extravagant
dancers. * * * Subordinate nervous attacks were much more frequent
during the seventeenth century, than at any former period. (Hecker,
Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp. 107-115, Engl. Trans.)

During the Middle Ages it appeared in Germany. It was a convulsion,
which in the most extraordinary manner infuriated the human frame; * * *
and was propogated by the _sight_ of the sufferers. They continued
dancing, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they
fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of
extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death. * * *
They were haunted by visions, and some of them afterwards asserted that
they had felt as if immersed in a _stream of blood_, which obliged them
to leap so high. George Fox, Journal 1, p. 100: "The word of the Lord
came to me again. * * * So I went up and down the streets crying, Woe to
the bloody city, Lichfield! And there seemed to me to be a channel of
blood running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a
pool of blood." In Germany it was called St. John's or St. Vitus's
dance. And long before its first appearance in that precise form, in
1374, it had, no doubt, been the real secret of the bacchanalian orgies
among the Greeks, and of the frantic, dervish-like gestures and cuttings
with knives and lancets which we read of among Asiatic races. In our own
day and country (thank God) thes