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As exhibited by the Records of the Bloomingdale Asylum, from June 16th, 1821, to December 31st, 1844: BY PLINY EARLE, M. D., Physician to the Asylum.

It was formerly customary with authors on mental alien-ation, to separate those agents or influences producing, believed to be productive of the disease, into remote and proximate, predisposing and exciting causes. Of' late years, and particularly in the annual reports made out by the physicians of the Institutions for the Insane, that cus-tom has fallen pretty generally into disuse.

In many of the cases of Insanity, it is extremely diffi-cult to fix upon any particular influence which we are satisfied was the origin of the disorder. Sometimes two causes are found, and it is impossible to tell which is the predisposing and which is the exciting. That power which in one case may stand in the relation of a remote cause, may in another, become the proximate.

If, therefore, in regard to many of the causes, the mo-dern writers have adopted the safest, and perhaps the most accurate method, by embodying all the generative influences of the disease into one class, and avoiding the endeavor to make a division where it is impossible to draw an accurate line of demarkation, they have perhaps, in reference to some others, fallen into error.

That constitutional condition of the system, transmit-ted from one generation to another, a condition, which although recondite in its nature, facilitates to a greater or less extent the invasion of mental derangement, and is generally known by the term hereditary predisposition, is invariably a remote or predisposing cause. According to our belief, wherever this natural condition exists, the person will retain the healthy action of his mind until he is subject to some other influence, more immediate, more active, more potent, and the tendency of which is to derange the physical functions of the system, so as to impair the manifestation of the mental powers.

For the reasons stated, we enter upon the subject of hereditary predisposition before proceeding to other causes.

In making up the statistics upon this subject, the rela-tives known to have been insane are given in full, instead of including the whole number of cases under the general term hereditary. Of the fifty-eight males and thirty-nine females placed against that term, in the subjoined tables, the simple fact that an inherited tendency existed, is mentioned upon the records, but the particular ancestor or ancestors who were insane, are not stated

TABLE 1. -- MALES.
Predisposition from direct Ancestors.

TABLE II.
Predisposition, as connected with collateral relatives

Descendants.

TABLE I. -- FEMALES.
Predisposition, from direct Ancestors.