I have been frequently obliged to give expression to my views on asylums and their future organisation. These views are expressed in official documents and private letters, which have never been published. A few observations which I made cursorily at the Naturforscher-Versammlung, in Hanover (“Zeitschr. f. Psychiatrie, “XXII., p. 390), as an indication of my point of view, were much too briefly and aphoristically given not to be subject to misconception. I therefore propose to devote the following pages to a connected, though necessarily brief, explanation of what I believe to be necessary or advantageous in the immediate future arrangement of lunacy matters in Germany, and to indicate towards which side I lean in the undoubted crisis which the question of the public provision for the insane has now reached. I apprehend neither detriment nor danger in this crisis, which is merely the progress towards more complete organisation. To wish to ignore it would not improve the matter. The predetermined conclusion to see the only good and right possible in things as they now exist is a far greater hindrance to the discovery of truth. If science can present new points of view, if urgent wants are brought to light, which cannot be satisfied by the present means of publicly providing for the insane, the requirements must not, in such circumstances, be ignored or denied, but the means must be made to suit the necessities. It was in this way that things were treated when the present asylums were founded; and is it possible that at the present time no further advance can be made ? It is, however, to be remarked, as was said a few years ago by Damerow, who was for the most part an authority with the opponents of reform (“Zeit-schr. f. Psychiatrie, “XIX., 1862, p. 187), “There is nothing further to be obtained in the future with the present public institutions for the cure and care of the insane.”

When I was engaged a short time ago in trying to determine accurately the effects of certain medicines on maniacal and epileptic patients, the temperature of the body in those patients was one of the things noted by me; and being unable to find in any book the normal standard in the insane, I made and analysed 2000 observations of temperature, so that I might have a standard with which to compare my cases. I examined and noted the temperature of all the patients in this asylum, using the thermometer recommended by Dr. Aitken. I took the temperature in the axilla, and my object being a practical one, instead of examining the patients at the times when the maximum and minimum heat is usually found, viz., immediately after waking, and at midnight, I did so between ten and 12 o'clock in the morning, and between nine and ten o'clock at night. The patients here all get up at 6.15 a.m., and go to bed at 8 p.m. Perhaps those hours will, on the whole, be found more useful and convenient than welfare of the patients are being seriously compromised—before the most congenial treatment for a whole class of patients is established. No. This system should be recognised at once in the first plan of every new asylum as necessary, essential, and immediately required.

From the brief summary I have given of the labours of the pathologists of the French school, it will be observed that the evidence deducible therefrom is of such a conflicting character as to leave quite unsettled the complex question of the localisation of the faculty of speech. The history of the continental contributions to the literature of aphasia would, however, be very incomplete, without a brief glance at the researches of the German and Dutch physiologists.

The accumulated numbers of the “Archivio Italiano per le Malatie Nervose,” for 1866 and 1867, contain so many valuable papers that I am most reluctantly compelled to choose only the best, or those most interesting to tne readers of the “Journal of Mental Science,” and to omit much that is good.

Pathology of the Brain in Cholera.—Dr. E. Mesnet devotes a paper to the consideration of the cerebral lesions observed in this disease. With the first period of the disease, that of prostration and enfeeblement, are associated functional disorders of the ganglionic nervous system; with the second, or reactive period, are associated those cerebral complications to which Mesnet directs our attention. In the cases of three persons who were seized with choleraic symptoms, while under the influence of alcoholic intoxication, the algidity and cyanotic symptoms did not come on. But about the tenth day of the disease a condition undistinguishable from delirium tremens made its appearance, and, after continuing three days, gave place to convalescence, which was inaugurated by an abundant and apparently critical perspiration. In general, he says, the discord between the nervous functions of animal life and those connected with relational existence is very striking. “There is nothing more affecting than the appearance of the asphyxie stage of collapse when the patient is in continual movement, when his features and skin are corpse-like, and visceral innervation appears to be extinguished, when all organic functions appear to have ceased, and when, nevertheless, his intellect is preserved and he can converse with us up to the last moment. The mind has no longer its natural vivacity; the con ceptions are languid; the memory requires to be stimulated; but when the patient is roused and the attention fixed, correct answers are obtained to questions put. The semi-comatose condition in which he is found is not the coma of cerebral disease, but a sort of drowsiness, which results from the general exhaustion of organic life. The benumbed condition of the senses is, in part, the cause of slowness of cerebral action; less sensitive to external stimuli, they transmit imperfect impressions, which are followed by obscure sensation. The hearing is almost lost, vision enfeebled, and sensi bility in general obtuse. As soon as the collapse begins to pass off, and reaction supervenes, the intellectual faculties recover from the torpidity to which we have referred, and the patient, who is more or less aware of his condition, becomes conscious of what is going on around him, and directs a restless attention to it.