Epilepsy, says Aræteus, “is an illness of various shapes, and horrible;” and Hippocrates, who existed five hundred years before him, in one of his terse aphorisms, states that those fits “which come on after twenty-five years of age, for the most part terminate in death.’” Lucretius, who lived in an age intervening between these two distinguished physicians, has with marvellous power pourtrayed the fearful symptoms of this apalling malady. Although a poet, and not a physician, his lines are equal in accuracy of delineation to those of the greatest pathologist.