Sir John Batty Tuke availed himself of the vote for the maintenance of the Lunacy Commission for England and Wales in order to lay before the House of Commons the extreme inadequacy of this Commission as at present constituted and to ask for some inquiry into the subject. He pointed out that there are only three medical commissioners to supervise the treatment of 114,000 lunatics, so that, while in Scotland there is one such commissioner to every 3622, in England the proportion is one to 38,000, and he maintained that a Commission so undermanned must necessarily work in a wooden fashion, unsympathetically and without elasticity. The numerical inadequacy of which he complained was, he said, growing worse and worse, for there had been no enlargement of the Commission since its establishment in 1845, while the number of the insane had increased nearly five-fold and while a great change had come over the conception of insanity. The insane person was no longer regarded as a psychological curiosity but as a pathological subject. The nation was doing its best to stamp out tuberculosis and cancer but it was not doing its best in respect to a disease which attacked three persons out of every 1000 and which, if not arrested, consigned its victims to a living death. Sir John Tuke was well supported by other medical Members of the House, and especially by Sir Michael Foster, who declared that in no branch of science had there been greater progress during the last generation than in the knowledge of the brain and the central nervous system. That wonderful web of delicate fibre and cells was being gradually unravelled and day by day a command was being obtained over the brain which was unknown when the Lunacy Acts were introduced. Though medical science had reduced other diseases, lunacy, if anything, was on the increase, and the main fault was in the present state of the lunacy laws which, if they did not hinder, certainly did not facilitate the application of science to the disease, especially in its early stages, in which it was most likely to be amenable to treatment. He proceeded to show the necessity for changes in the present methods of notification and certification and strongly supported Sir John Tuke's demand for a complete inquiry. Dr. R. Farquharson, who followed, dwelt upon the superiority of the Scotch method of managing what are often described as “border cases” and declared that there ought to be special hospitals or special wards and special pathological institutions. In fact, there was a general recognition by the medical Members of the House that the time had come when insanity should be regarded as a disease like other diseases and that it should be investigated and treated by ordinary clinical methods. The Attorney-General, in rising to maintain on the part of the Government that everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, “was not satisfied” that there was any proof of increase of insanity. He has, however, presented a Bill, which was read for the first time on Wednesday afternoon, having for its object the amendment of the Lunacy Acts. His somewhat unscientific attitude in his speech makes of his practical action a pleasant surprise.