Dr. Skac of the Morningside Asylum in Edinburgh, says in his annual report that among the patients who died last year was one who had been in the asylum for 29 years, and was a thorough gentleman. He possessed considerable humor, was an excellent player at bowls and billiards and whist. He displayed the most singular delusion of any man he (Dr. Skac) ever met. He asserted that he was upwards of twenty thousand years of age, and described the pre-historic period of the earth, during which he had witnessed three floods greater than Noah’s. Noah, he knew very well, and described him as a nice lad when he knew him first, but as having latterly fallen into dissipated habits. He has commanded numerous large armies at various periods, and for the last three or four thousand years was Agustus J. Caesar (his usual signature) commander-in-chief of the Roman armies. His anecdotes and imagination were inexhaustible, and a large book might be readily filled with the history he gave of himself and his time during his long, imaginary and eventful life.
Bill already has a copy of this article (one of the earliest I transcribed). However, I know something that he doesn’t…
“Dr. Skac” is more likely to be “Dr. Skae”. At Distributed Proofeaders, this typographical mistake is called a stealth scanno and denotes a word that is incorrect, but would still pass a spell-checker. Skac would have passed our editor in 1868, since he didn’t have spell-check and probably wasn’t familiar with Scottish names.
Sometimes listed as “David” and sometimes as “F,” Skae was one of the earliest directors of the Asylum, later known as the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. He apparently had a particular interest in classifying mental illnesses.
As for Mr. Caesar, well, who knows?