When one compares the few details left as about the life of Shakspere with the wealth of materials for writing the biography of Tasso we might suppose that there would be little doubt about the main facts in the life of the great Italian poet. Nevertheless some of the most important passages in his life have been the subject of controversy for the last 300 years. These questions especially regarded the treatment Tasso met with from the ducal family of Este, and unless we understand these relations correctly, we may totally misconceive the character of the poet and all the later events of his life. It seems strange that such questions have remained so long undecided; but biographers and critics are often much better acquainted with books and texts and languages than with human nature. A fine illustration of this is furnished by the Life of Tasso † by the Rev. Mr. Milman. Here we may refer the reader to a paper in this Journal of January, 1877. The author, whose initials are A. C. M., though his study of the life of Tasso had apparently gone no further than a perusal of Milman's book, was able to show many of the errors into which the biographer had fallen. In truth Mr. Milman, although he took up the traditional view that Tasso was the victim of vindictive persecution by the Machiavelian Duke of Ferrara, yet was too candid to repress a number of facts which, in the eyes of an able psychologist, showed that his whole treatment of the life of Tasso was founded upon a complete misconception or ignorance of the ordinary symptoms of mental derangement.

Fifty years ago Baillarger† showed from a study of 453 cases that insanity is one third more frequently transmitted from the mothers to the children than from the fathers, and that in the case of sons the transmission is as frequently from one parent as from the other, and in the case of daughters the disposition to insanity is inherited twice as frequently from the mother as from the father. Leubuscher† apparently referring to some later statistics of Baillarger's dealing with 600 cases, found that:—

I propose to-day to discuss certain conditions of the circulatory system of the insane which are of interest clinically, and which have been illustrated by cases seen by me recently.

The case of W. C., a boarded-out lunatic, who recently made a murderous attack upon the wife and child of his guardian, has brought under public notice and discussion several matters connected with lunacy administration in Scotland. It would, obviously, be improper to discuss questions here which are still under the responsible consideration of the General Board of Lunacy. Therefore I do not intend to refer to such questions, and may venture to express the hope that the subsequent discussion will be confined to the one point raised, viz., the mode of procedure adopted by the criminal authorities.

I propose, in this paper, to give a brief account of an investigation carried out in Professor Kraepelin's laboratory at Heidelberg, and undertaken with the view of gaining some first-hand knowledge of the methods I brought before the notice of the Association last July.

The subject matter of this paper can hardly fail to be of special interest at the present time, when so much attention is being given to, and so much done for, the nursing staff of every asylum.

“We very much doubt whether this table will ever show much diminution on these numbers, for as time goes on the work of special certification will become more difficult and intricate.” So writes in the January number of the Journal of Mental Science the reviewer of the last Report of the Commissioners in Lunacy for England and Wales regarding the Table (Appendix B) which gives the number of readmissions on fresh reception orders rendered necessary by the previous order having expired under the Lunacy Act, 1890, sec. 38.

Chapter I.

General Considerations—Normal Standards of External Brain Architecture—New Details of Unusual Forms of Convolutions and Furrows—Many Deviations from Type accepted from Several Observers—Chief Deviations from Usual Form in Brains examined by the Writer, and the lines on which they occur; their significance and appraisement from a general point of view.

In an Address' in the Section of Psychology at the Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, London, 1895, I touched upon some of the results of an analysis of many necropsies I had made, with regard to abnormal forms and arrangements of brain convolutions, and mentioned the dissatisfaction one had felt with some of the accepted standards of convolutional form. With regard to unsatisfactory standards of normal brain-form, it was stated in the Address that “we may take it for granted, and need not tarry to prove, that a different normal standard of brain-form obtains in different stages of individual life, in different races of mankind, and, as a logical inference, must obtain also in different ages of the world and epochs of time; for what practically concerns us at the moment is the normal set of standards for modern British brains. The standards of the normal, hitherto chiefly in use, and with which I began, were unsatisfactory, defective, incomplete, insufficient in range, and even misleading. For their unsatisfactoriness there are several reasons. One is that some of them have been diagrammatic or schematic, thus unduly accentuating some features and minimising or omitting others. Another is that the brains from which certain figures and descriptions are drawn have been taken from dissecting-room subjects, or from patients—most of them ‘incapables’ of various kinds, dying in rate-supported or State-supported institutions—of whose life-history little or nothing is known in many instances; who often are failures in life—waifs and strays—broken fragments of the wreckage of civilisation, the indication of degeneracy and breakdown. and such failures, waifs and wreckage are they very often—most often, indeed—because of their mental defect or perverted aberrant type of mind, which not infrequently has as its accompaniment, sometimes pathological brain change; but sometimes also, or solely, has an abnormal brain development and aberrant gyral conformation. Indeed, knew we their ancestral and life-history fully, we would search such subjects for some of the most interesting forms of convolutional deviation from type. and still more would this be the case, if, especially in the past and in some countries, dissecting-room subjects have been largely recruited from the criminals dying in prisons, and the mentally decayed and defective dying in asylums. Therefore it is not surprising to find that sometimes the brains taken from the sources previously referred to, and published as typical, are what I do not hesitate to declare and describe as being brains of deranged or of defective development, and utterly misleading if taken as normal.”