FUNCTIONAL BRAIN DEGENERACY.Read in the Section on Medical Jurisprudence and Neurology, at the Forty-second Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association, held at Washington, D. C., May, 1891.

Abstract

It is interesting to notice how much we are given to the habit of grading and estimating others in society. We are continually engaged in this kind of work, and we consider the opinions we have of our acquaintances and associates as very valuable items of information. So intuitive and instinctive is this kind of work that we do it unconsciously, as it were; and as soon as we make an acquaintance, we find ourselves silently estimating and classifying him. The two particulars in which we generally consider it very important to estimate others are, first, their intellectual ability; and secondly, their ethical sense. We call these "mental and moral qualities," and recognize that they are more or less distinct and separate. In common with all other living beings, man lives in competitive life; and so fundamental and continuous, from the earliest existence of life in the world, has been