THE WITCH.
ARABESQUES BY PARANOIAC ARTIST.
total absence of perspective, while the rest of the execution shows clearly enough that the author is not wanting in artistic sense. One would take him to be a true artist, but one brought up in China or ancient Egypt. Here we have evidently a kind of atavism explicable by arrested development of some one organ, and a corresponding backwardness in the products of that organ. A French captain, suffering from paralysis, drew figures stiff as Egyptian profiles. A megalomaniac of Reggio executed a coloured bas-relief, in which the disproportionate size of the feet and hands, the extreme smallness of the faces, and the stiffness of the limbs, completely recall the work of the thirteenth century. Another patient, at Genoa, carved bas-reliefs on pipes and on vases, exactly similar to those of the Neolithic Age.
Raggi has sent me some flints carved by a monomaniac entirely ignorant of archæology, which, in the choice of figures and emblems, recall the style of Egyptian and Phœnician amulets. In these instances we see the influence of similar psychical conditions at work.