The Eighth Report of the Commissioners in Lunacy to the Lord Chancellor has just been issued, and a more enlightened or satisfactory document has rarely come from the State Paper Office. It not only indicates like all preceding Reports, the amount of work done by the Commission in behalf of the helpless and afflicted class, over whose interests it presides, but in several important respects it also marks a considerable advancement of opinion.

“He came, he went, like the simoon, That harbinger of fate and gloom, Beneath whose widely-wasting breath, The very cypress droops to death.’'—Byron.

The frequent occurrence of Cholera, in different parts of the United Kingdom, of late years, and its prevalence at present, secms to point out the necessity of our being prepared for its appearance, particularly in public institutions, and amongst others, Lunatic Asylums, which in some instances have suffered severely from this disease. In the West Riding of York Asylum, containing 633 patients, 98 are reported to have died from cholera in the autumn of 1849. The private asylums for pauper lunatics generally about London and in some other places, suffered more or less from the same epidemic; whether from cholera or some other cause, the mortality in the Lancaster Asylum was unusually high, 48 per cent in 1833, according to “a table of patients admitted, &c,” in the annual reports of that institution.