My Lord Leigh and Gentlemen,—Your presence here so far shews your interest in the subject on which I have had the honour to be called upon to address you, that I have confidence you will extend to me your patient attention while I enter into details which may not at first seem to be attractive except to medical men.

Though many writers have advocated the use of digitalis in various forms of insanity—such as acute, paralytic, or epileptic mania—yet there appears to be great diversity of opinion as to its efficacy, great variety in the methods of administering it, and a wide range in the quantities prescribed. While one has been content to order five to ten minims of the tincture three or four times a day, another has given, in similar cases, single doses of half-an-ounce of the same preparation.

Is consciousness something distinct from the intellectual operations named perceiving, conceiving, reasoning, recollecting, imagining; or do these operations ever take place in the absence of consciousness? In order to answer this vital question it is necessary that consciousness should be examined with a microscopic nicety, rarely, as we take it, attained to since Reid explored this field of science. When we consider that, for forty years, Reid, with an enthusiastic admiration for that inductive method which the genius of Newton and others illuminated with such brilliancy, questioned Nature, Nature in man, as to the character of perception, and decided that the objects disclosed by it were not mentally possessed; investigators are bound, for their own credit's sake, to show beyond doubt that Reid is in error before they flippantly accuse him of being singularly wanting in penetration. Yet the conclusion which is forced upon us by the present aspect of psychology and cerebral physiology, not to mention metaphysic, is to the effect either that Reid was singularly wanting in analytical ability, or that the living race of psychologists must be going far astray on a most vital point. We have lately been forced to believe that Reid is on the right road; yet, sooth to say, during many years objects have been to us, as it would seem to psychologists in general, a most fertile source of perplexity and confusion. It is only very lately we have succeeded in realising the fact that the object, or the known, is not an element of the knowing; that knowing is not knowing plus known, but knowing purely and simply, a single fact, not a double one; not a synthesis of consciousness and object, but consciousness only, that and nothing more.

The Mad Hercules is not one of the best of Euripides' tragedies; but it has a particular interest for us, because it is the only one extant in which madness is personified, and introduced on the stage. This had been already done by æschylus, in his version of the story of the Bacchæ, and was adopted by Euripides amongst the terrifying effects borrowed from the elder dramatist for this play.

The inner world of prison life is one of the best fields for the study of psychological questions, speculative as well as practical If the circumstances are somewhat exceptional, they have the special advantage of being uniform in their application; and this uniformity represents a standard to which individual minds, or particular groups of mind, bear a relation, and at which they may be tested. Imprisonment is the very antithesis of social usage, an involuntary servitude taking the place of the liberty of the subject, and it is surely a matter of no little interest to watch how social beings, varying in moral and intellectual status, bear themselves under confinement and a complete change in their circumstances and surroundings.

An important case—“Boughton v. Knight”—in which a will was opposed on the ground of the testator's insanity, has recently occupied the Court of Probate for fourteen days. Without entering into the details of so long a case, we print the summing up of Sir James Hannen, so far as it bears upon the general question of testamentary capacity. After a few introductory remarks, he proceeded as follows:—

The spiritual history of a man is never without interest to his fellows. How a great man lived and moved and had his being; how he met and faced this cunning, cheating world; how he bore himself to his fellows, and how he accomplished the work that lay to his hand; these are matters which are fall of deep interest, of true pathos to men who are amongst their fellows; to men who are striving to live justly and honestly in this present world. Each other life that we come to know and feel with, has not lived for itself, but for us. Other men have suffered that we may be free from pain. The victory of another may be ours through the magic of sympathy. There is a deep perennial truth in this matter of vicarious suffering. We find it illustrated in the sacrifices of all religions, and in the central doctrine of Christianity itself. It is in this aspect that hero-worship is excellent. “We may make our lives divine,” and the way to succeed in that endeavour is by means of a thorough knowledge of, a deep and noble sympathy with, that which is divine in our fellow men. The examples such men leave are indeed noble benefactions to the race. A Peabody bequest is a small thing in comparison with the living records of a life well spent. That being so, the value of biography can be understood, and if the infinite significance of a true life of a real man is appreciated, the sorrow which must be felt on account of the rarity of such works cannot but be great. True there is no lack of so-called “Biographies,” but these fall far short of the requirements of the perfect record of a life. In these, for the most part, we find not the life of a man but a number of the circumstances which he lived through. How these modified him, how he moulded the iron of circumstance, for the most part, we hear not.

The following description of Rousseau's madness is taken from the admirable “Life of Rousseau,” by Mr. John Morley, which has been recently published:—

The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarks invariably made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, is that he must be mad.

Dr. George M. Beard, of New York, has delivered lately a lecture on this subject, in which he lays down some propositions in a rather startling form:—

The lecturer began by giving a résumé of papers previously read before the Society, on Young Men in History; an Inquiry into the Relation of Age to Work. He stated that from an analysis of the lives of 1000 representative men in all the great branches of human effort, he had made the discovery that the golden decade was between thirty and forty; the silver between forty and fifty; the brazen between twenty and thirty; the iron between fifty and sixty, and so on. The superiority of youth and middle life over old age in original work appears all the greater when we consider the fact that nearly all the positions of honour, and profit, and prestige—professorships and public stations—and nearly all the money of the world are in the hands of the old. Reputation, like money and prestige, is mainly confined to the old.

Among the crowd of reports with which we have been favoured this year, it is only necessary that we should notice a few, taken almost at random, and extract from these any passages which may be of special interest. Of all their official duties, the writing of the annual report must be to the majority of medical superintendents their most disagreeable one. They are supposed to be written for the information of Committees of Visitors, and, such being the case, need not contain more than the most meagre medical details. Yet it is advisable that each superintendent should utilise, for his own benefit and that of his brethren in the speciality, his asylum experiences, and place them on record. Now, it is more than questionable if it is a judicious plan to incorporate medical topics with those usually submitted to the perusal of Committees of Visitors, and which constitute in their eyes the only matter of importance. It is an undoubted fact that many asylum reports contain medical observations of the highest importance; but they are really lost, for we do not possess any method for facilitating reference to their contents. No man when working up a subject can afford the time to wade through all the asylum reports issued in the United Kingdom during the last twenty years. What becomes of all the reports issued annually? To obtain the true answer it is only necessary to enter the library of almost any superintendent in the country, where we may see these documents—in many of which much trouble had been bestowed in the preparation—lying in a heap of confusion at the bottom of some cupboard specially reserved for the reception of the “dead dogs,” as they have been called. Now, though it is gratifying to find in reports the records of medical experience, it is also a matter much to be regretted that good medical work should not be recorded in a more appropriate and convenient place.

In the January number of this Journal for 1872 Dr. Anstie's book on Neuralgia was reviewed, and now we have a larger volume on the same subject by Dr. Chapman. Dr. Anstie put forward the theory that the disease means weakness of the body, and especially anæmia and atrophy of certain nerve centres in the brain; Dr. Chapman thinks it has but little to do with weakened vitality, and results from hyperæmia of the nerve centres. Anstie says the general health of nearly all his patients was bad; Chapman avers that neuralgic patients “live on often to a ripe old age, the term of their existence not being appreciably shortened by the disease.” Anstie thinks it is a very hereditary disease indeed; Chapman does not think it very often so transmitted. The former treats it by all sorts of nutritive and tonic means; the latter treats it by “spinal ice bags.” But we shall allow Dr. Chapman to state his own theory on the whole subject.

I have received the following periodicals, of whose contents a résumé is given:—

American Journal of Insanity, Vol. xxviii., January to April, 1872.

This is an interesting memoir, partly from the social position of the chief person concerned, partly from the difficulty of reconciling the symptoms and post-mortem appearances with the different forms of insanity as we know them.