COLEGATE D. OWINGS' CASE.—1 BLAND. 361

humor, which will not incapacitate a man from managing his own
affairs, or making a valid contract. It must be something more
than this; * something which, if there be any test, is held
by the common judgment of mankind, to affect his general 385
fitness to be trusted with the management of himself and his own
concerns. The degree of proof must be still stronger, when a per-
son brings a suit on allegation of his own incapacity, by exposing
to view the changes of his mind." Turner v. Meyers, 1 Hagg.
Cons. Rep. 414. And an eminent physician, in "An Inquiry con-
cerning the Indications of Insanity,'' observes, that "the same
intellectual light may be given to all; but in some obscured by a
gross organization, and in others, more happily organized, shining
forth more brightly. Itself out of the reach of physical injury, it
works by physical instruments; and the exactness of its operations
depends on the growth, maturity, integrity, and vigor of its in-
struments, which are the brain and nervous system. If the nerv-
ous agents of sensation are unfaithful, the mind receives false
intelligence, or transmits its orders by imbecile messengers: if the
seat of thought, the centre of intellectual and moral government,
is faultily arranged; the operations of the understanding are im-
peded and incomplete. Nay, so dependent is the immaterial soul
upon the material organs, both for what it receives and what it
transmits, that a slight disorder in the circulation of the blood
through different portions of nervous substance, can disturb all
sensation, all emotion, all relation with the external and the living
world; can obstruct attention and comparison, can injure and con-
found the accumulations in the memory, or modify the suggestions
of imagination.'' Conolly Ind. Ins. 62.

The plaintiff has been subject to attacks from a disorder, that
has repeatedly darkened her understanding with delirium; the
proofs exhibit some of her conduct as indicative of lunacy; and
that dotage, or intellectual weakness, which the bill represents to
be her present condition, is a species of insanity which does not
appear to have been very attentively considered, either by the pro-
fession of medicine or of the law. Its approaches are most com-
monly so gradual as to be for some time imperceptible, and the
early evidences of it are almost always exceedingly equivocal.
Under the generic legal term, non compos mentis, is comprehended
every species of mental derangement which incapacitates a man
from assenting to, or making a legal contract. But, for the pur-
pose of obtaining as clear a view as may be of a subject so ob-
scure, and without placing too much reliance upon any general
definitions, * I shall follow what appear to be the snbstan-
tial distinctions marked by external indications, and recog- 386
nized by our law as manifested in idiocy, delirium, lunacy, and
dotage. 1 Par. & Fonb. 307; Rush on the Mind, 234; Shelf. Lun.
intro. s. 2.