COLEGATE B. OWINGS' CASE.

something which, if there be any test, is held by the common
judgment of mankind, to affect his general fitness to be trusted
with the management of himself and his own concerns. The degree
of proof must be still stronger, when a person brings a suit on
allegation of his own incapacity, by exposing to view the changes
of his mmd."(c) 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 vigour of its instru-
ments, which are the brain and nervous system. If the nervous
agents of sensation are unfaithful, the mind receives false intelli-
gence, 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 impeded
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 dif-
ferent 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 confound the
accumulations in the memory, or modify the suggestions of imagi-
nation."(d)

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 purpose
of obtaining as clear a view as may be of a subject so obscure,
and without placing too much reliance upon any general definitions,

(c) Turner v. Meyers, 1 Hagg. Cons. Rep. 414.—(d) Conolly Ind. Ins. 62.

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