Gentlemen,—In assuming the honourable position to which, by your kindness, I have been elected, I must thank you sincerely for the confidence you have placed in me; at the same time I can assure you honestly that, so far from having sought this distinction, only the feeling that one ought not to shrink from any duty to which one is called by one's professional brethren, has induced me to accept it. Looking back upon the many distinguished names who have preceded me in this office, I may well feel some diffidence in addressing you.

The details of the case I now propose to speak of have been published in the January and July numbers of “The Journal of Mental Science” of this year. In the January number the clinical history was reported as far as it went; shortly after its publication the patient died, and in the July issue the further progress and termination of the case were given, and the result of the post-mortem examinations detailed. I will not now detain you by reading the full report, but in order to carry you with me it will be necessary to recapitulate the main features of the case, supplementing them by a few particulars which have been evolved by further study of the pathological appearances presented in microscopic sections.

I wish to bring under the notice of the Association the case of a gentleman who some years ago became notorious through the graphic pen of Charles Dickens, and whose recent death has drawn fresh attention to his strange mode of life. Already nearly 10,000 copies of a biographical sketch of the hermit have been sold, and a brisk sale, I am informed, is still going on, while a large quantity of crockery, tea services, &c., representing his dwelling, have been sold. Being familiar with the residence of Lucas, the so-called Hermit of Red-Coat's Green, near Hitchin, and having visited him, I feel considerable interest in the question of his insanity (if indeed a medical psychologist could question it), and in the larger question whether, if insane, the character of the mental disorder in this and similar cases calls for any interference with the individual's liberty.

With the exception of the condition of a person labouring under acute mania, no phase of insanity so thoroughly arrests the attention of even an uneducated observer as that which has been styled stupor in late years. Painful as it is to see the vagaries and extravagances of the former, hardly less so is it to contemplate in the latter the great impairment of mental power, which may reach even to almost total obliteration. But while on the one hand acute mania has been elaborately described from every point of view—indeed, the very nature of its symptoms force a recognition, and demand prompt treatment—yet stupor has received but little attention, considering what an important element it may become in a case. In fact, it is only comparatively recently that it has been looked upon as anything more than mere “depression.” For more than a casual mention of it, we must chiefly refer to French psychological literature, to the writings of such men as Baillarger, Esquirol, Brierre de Boismont, Dagonet, etc. But these authorities differ much in their opinions, even as to the fundamental nature or natures of the sets of mental phenomena which are included under this comprehensive term.

The relations of body and mind are becoming not only much more comprehensible, but even much better understood, since science has shaken off the incubus of theological teaching as to the severance of soul and body. As long as the mind was something separated from the body, or only united to it by slack and loosely fitting ties, mental phenomena could have nothing to do with bodily conditions—insanity was a disease of the soul; and the monk, standing over a miserable lunatic chained to a staple in a wall, and flogging him in order to make him cast his devil out, was a logical outcome of this hypothesis, however repugnant to more recent and correcter views. The baneful psychology of theologians is now thoroughly undermined, and the erroneous and mischievous superstructure is cracking and gaping on every side, and ere long the ground occupied by a crumbling ruin will be covered by a gradually growing erection based on a foundation of facts, and reared by an expanding intelligence. The union of psychology and physiology is the closing of the circuit, in one direction, of the pursuit after knowledge, and forms the initiation of a rational and intelligible comprehension of the mind and of its relation to corporeal conditions. How such mistaken and false ideas of the word melancholia, as those entertained by the monk as an alienist physician, could have attained their sway in the face of such maxim as mens sana in corpore sano, only becomes intelligible when we remember the ignorance, the superstitious prejudices, the contempt for the knowledge of the natural man, which ever characterise the theological mind, and which found their highest expression during the monkish supremacy of the dark ages—that interval of black ignorance which intervened betwixt the decadence of Latin civilisation and that intellectual evolution, the Renaissance, which indicated the advent of the reign of human intelligence. Slowly but surely was the emancipation of the intellect from the fetters of priestly tyranny achieved, as death thinned the ranks of its opponents, and the grim despotism of Torquemada and his coadjutors waned into the pettier and less terrible persecution of more recent ecclesiastics, and the tremendous grip of hierarchical supremacy gradually merged into the palsied, nerveless grasp of a doting and dying theology, the mere spectre of its former self. Curious men were the Church's leaders of the middle ages. In their cathedrals the light of day was only permitted to enter to a limited extent, and that too through the medium of coloured glass, so as to produce the “dim religious light,” while artificial lights burnt up before their altars; so were their minds closed to the natural light of the human understanding, and artificially illumined by the creations of their diseased imaginations, amidst whose coloured rays the white light of truth was always obscured, if not rarely utterly lost. But in the mortality of man lies the hope, the salvation of truth.

Newcastle-on-Tyne.—Ninth Annual Report.—Mr. Wickham enters into the following defence of Australian tinned meats, which they, perhaps, hardly required:—“The Australian tinned meats, which are now freely used, at first met with much opposition, and, even now, a few of the more ill-humoured patients object to them. To some of the better disposed ones the flavour is at first a little disagreeable, but the same may be said of fairly intelligent people outside, and they are so very few here that it is impossible to consider them in the arrangement of a diet table. As for its nutritious qualities, I have only to say that the patients eating it (excluding those suffering from wasting diseases) gain, or at least retain, their weight. The recovery rate for the three years I have held office has been 45 9 per cent. as against 33 5 per cent. during the previous five years, and the death rate has been steadily decreasing, while the necessity for ordering extras for the sick is reduced to the very lowest minimum. The Australian meat has been largely used during that time, and, though I do not wish to ascribe these satisfactory results to its agency, it must be apparent that it has not interfered with the primary objects of the institution.”