been
traced. He was, in fact, a somewhat good specimen of a half-savage,
without any seriously criminal instincts. The girls were apparently
attractive, marrying early and sometimes not badly; but the
gipsy-like character of the race was unsuited to success in a
civilised country. So the descendants went to the bad, and such
hereditary moral weaknesses as they may have had, rose to the
surface and worked their mischief without check. Cohabiting with
criminals, and being extremely prolific, the result was the
production of a stock exceeding 500 in number, of a prevalent
criminal type. Through disease and intemperance the breed is now
rapidly diminishing; the infant mortality has of late been horrible,
but fortunately the women of the present generation bear usually but
few children, and many of them are altogether childless.

The criminal classes contain a considerable portion of epileptics
and other persons of instable, emotional temperament, subject to
nervous explosions that burst out at intervals and relieve the system.
The mad outbreaks of women in convict prisons is a most curious
phenomenon. Some of them are apt from time to time to have a
gradually increasing desire that at last becomes irresistible, to
"break out," as it is technically called; that is, to smash and tear
everything they can within reach, and to shriek, curse, and howl. At
length the fit expends itself; the devil, as it were, leaves them,
and they begin to behave again in their ordinary way. The highest
form of emotional instability exists in confirmed epilepsy, where
its manifestations have often been studied; it is found in a high
but somewhat less extraordinary degree in the hysterical and allied
affections. In the confirmed epileptic constitution the signs of
general instability of nervous action are muscular convulsions,
irregularities of bodily temperature, mobile intellectual activity,
and extraordinary oscillations between opposed emotional states. I
am assured by excellent authority that instable manifestations of
extreme piety and of extreme vice are almost invariably shown by
epileptics, and should be regarded as a prominent feature of their
peculiar constitution. These unfortunate beings see no incongruity
between the pious phrases that they pour out at one moment and their
vile and obscene language in the next; neither do they show
repentance for past misconduct when they are convicted of crimes,
however abominable these may be. The