Mental Epidemics among the Lower Animals

Abstract

In supplement of my paper on “The Physiology of Mind in the Lower Animals,” and in anticipation of the correlative essay, which I hope by-and-bye to contribute to the “Journal of Mental Science,” on “The Pathology of Mind in the Lower Animals,” I am desirous—so long as the whole British public has a vivid memory of certain signal illustrations of the fact, or phenomena—to direct attention to the circumstance that the lower animals, in common with man, are subject to certain forms of Epidemic Mental Derangement. I allude more especially, at present, to that form thereof which is popularly known as Panic, and technically described as Timoria or Panphobia; an affection that is very properly included among “Epidemic Mental Diseases” in the short account given of them by Dr. Browne, ex-Commissioner in Lunacy for Scotland, in “Chambers's Encyclopædia” (vol. iv, 1862, p. 92). The illustrations to which I would specially draw attention, in the case of the lower animals, are to be found, on the one hand, in the notorious Stampedesof Cavalry Horses, which characterized the well-known “autumn manóuvres” at Aldershot, about the end of August and beginning of September, 1871, as well as the later military manóuvres near the Russian capital (in September, 1871); and on the other hand, the Stampedes of other domestic and wild animals, during the more recent devastating conflagrations of Chicago, and of the prairies or forests of Michigan and Wisconsin, (in October, 1871.)