olitude; more easily won upon by the arts of
delusion, and inflamed by the contagion of the passions." Hence we may
account for the rapidity with which in orphan houses, cloisters, and other
institutions, where numbers of the sex are intimately connected with each
other, the sickness, humour, habits, of one, if conspicuous and
distinguished, become those of all. I remember to have read in a medical
writer of considerable merit, that in a French convent of nuns, of more
than common magnitude, one of the sisters was seized with a strange
impulse to mew like a cat, in which singular propensity she was shortly
imitated by several other sisters, and finally, without a solitary
exception, by the whole convent, who all joined at regular periods in a
general mew that lasted several hours. The neighbourhood heard, with more
astonishment than edification, the daily return of this celestial
symphony, which was silenced, after many ineffectual measures, by
terrifying the modesty of the sex with the menace, that, on any future
repetition of their concert, a body of soldiers, pretended to be stationed
at the gates of the monastery, would be called in to inflict upon them a
discipline at once shameful and severe.

"Among all the epidemic fancies of the sex I have found upon record, none
equals that related by Cardan to have displayed itself in the fifteenth
century,--which forcibly illustrates what has been remarked of the
intuitive contagion by which fantastic affection is propagated among
women. A nun in a certain German convent was urged by an unaccountable
impulse to bite all her companions; and her strange caprice gradually
spread to others, till the whole body was infected by the same fury. Nor
did the evil confine itself within these limits: the report of this
strange mania travelled from one province to another, and every where
conveyed with it the infectious folly, from cloister to cloister, through
the German empire; from thence extending itself on each side to Holland
and Italy, the nuns at length worried one another from Rome to Amsterdam.

"Numberless instances might be quoted to demonstrate the force with which
the strangest and most wild propensities fasten themselves on the
imagination, and conquer and tyrannise over the will, when the soul is
debarred from a free intercourse with its species, and left too
uninterruptedly to its own unbridled musings. But those which we have
related may be sufficient to show the danger