The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-06-02
SCIENTISTS SAY ALL FOLK ARE MAN|ACS Personal Peculiarities Make
 a Man a Maniac MOST ARE HARMLESS Highsounding Names Given to Peo- pie Who Have Habit of Scratch
 ing Their Head or Cutting
 off Mustache
From Pearson,s Magazine.

| Are you a maniac? What a personal question! What an absurd suggestion. or course you are not--at least, you don't think you are, Mental scientists think otherwise, and they have just in vented a frightful list of names for our little manaics. After all a mnlac Is only a person suffering from mania, and although the word is associated in our minds with the inmates of asylums, there are others" as the catch phrase says
 Mother Johnny will have to see doctor at once" any fond father might well say after reading the British Med teal Journal the poor little fellow has undoubtedly got 'stomatodactylo- mania.
 l "Oh James, whatever makes you say 1 that? What an awful disease~ mother would reply.
 As matter of fact, the awful sound | ing disease is really not dangerous, and is only the baby habit or mania for sucking the fingers under the selected scientific name.
 l No fretful little mister will ever dare | to bite his nails again after the latest addition to our knowledge. Tell him he is regular "onychophagomania and If that doesn't frighten him nothing will. f
 There Is hardly a single person. man. woman or child--who is not the victim of some mania or peculiarity. many of which have been allotted blood curdling names. Every one has at some I time or the other seen distressing eX- amples of the aginomaniac." Probably they don't recognize the dis ease under it's scientific title. No doubt | the afflicted person did strike them as being possessed of a quaint habit. but when they saw him of the riding brooches and logging switching his legs l under the vain impression that he was 1 bestride horse they had no idea his | case was so serious.
 There is. after all, some good reason for the modern craze among men to ruthlesly chop off their boards or mustaches. The practice is really akin to vaccination It guards, or is said to guard, our sacred person from the ter TOTS of smallpox, and in the razor lies our chance of safety against becoming n 'mustachio- o-strepsomaniac." once we allow our mustaches to grow we are in dangerfi and if we find ourselves twirl- ing a flowing military ornament or nervously lingering a stubby upper lip we are infected with the deadly dis sease.
 Now that the holiday season is com ing along many of us will be going to the country for fortnight. and in the fields and quiet lanes We may at any moment be confronted by "capilioir- riomaniac."
 We need not stay at home or pur- chase a Browning automatic" for fear of meeting one of these maniacs, for if we do his special form of disea SC will only evince itself in the oft ob- served habit of pushing the hat to the back of the head and scratching the scalp. generally prior to answering any question on subjects which call for more consideration than a remark on the weather or the state of the farm crops.
 The bulk of these manaics which sci ence has tabluated might well be left at large, but they have located and named--as the naturalists say--one spe- cies which, harmless though it is, is nevertheless a nuisance to mank ind The man or woman who struns on the window pane or desk, the people who insist on humming tunes with utter dis regard to the authors original inten- tions and the soleful looking youth who persists in whistling deleful dirses in a moro or less minor key have all been classed under the heading of "har-
 moniomanics," and, as such, they should be shut up away from their fellow men until they are quite cured.