My first duty is to repeat my most cordial thanks to you for the high honor you have done me in electing me to be your President; my next to proceed at once to the delivery of the address which your successive Presidents are expected to give. I feel reluctant to depart from the order laid down by our Secretary, but perceiving that it is my duty to guide your proceedings, and as the business to be brought before you is two-fold, I will divide my address. This morning I will examine into the organization and objects of the association, since these must come before you, and in the afternoon, if time permit, will make a few remarks on the progress and prospects of Mental Science.

Lord Brougham's career has repeatedly been the theme of mingled admiration and regret—admiration of his remarkable talents and eloquence; regret that one so gifted should have failed to sustain the position and reputation which he once enjoyed.

In an address I had the honour to deliver before the St. Andrew's Medical Graduates Association in November last, I took the opportunity briefly to direct the attention of those practitioners of medicine who are not specially engaged in the treatment of the insane, to the great importance of recognizing the influence of mental action on physical disease. I ventured to press the fact that the most scientific physicians have fallen into the error of studying, with too exclusive a care, the observable conditions of the body, healthy or diseased, and those agents or agencies for curing diseases which produce the most obvious effects—such as knives and other instruments, anæsthetic vapours, active drugs, heat and cold, electrical shocks, and the like. I admitted that as the pure physical existence is the groundwork and the primary necessity of the highest form of living thinking thing, it is by nature the first duty of the healer to make that corporeal frame pure and whole, but I insisted that it is equally his duty to study what shall enter by the senses or windows of the mind, and though invisibly entering, be potent forces for evil or for good. Because an agency is not visible, not tangible, is it, I asked, less real? If a man lose his mind by the failure of his blood, that, it is said, is plain to understand, for it is physical; but if some horror come upon the man through his mind, so that, like poor Horatio, he is be-chilled

“Almost to jelly by the act of fear, Stands dumb, and speaks not,”

is not that, too, physical?—an action direct of mind on matter, reversing the physics of the body, and creating disease? It must be so; and in the study of this action, from the universe into the man, there lies, I maintained, a world almost unknown.

Dr. Lockhart Robertson, in the April number of the “Journal of Mental Science,” raises the very interesting question whether the increase of late years in the registered number of the Insane in England and Wales represents an increase, real, or apparent only, in the amount of insanity amongst the population at large. After a laborious collection and study of the statistics relating to insanity, Dr. Robertson arrives at the conclusion that the increase is apparent rather than real—in other words, that the number of registered lunatics has largely increased, but that the amount of insanity amongst the population at large evidences a decline, particularly of late years. As a contribution to the study of this question, I venture to offer a few statistics referring to the insane population in the District of the County and City of Waterford.

In the first two parts of this essay I entered into the subject of the bibliography of aphasia, as illustrated by the French, German, Dutch, British, and American writers; the third part contains a detailed account of the clinical history of cases that have fallen under my own immediate observation; the fourth treats of the different forms and varieties in which loss or lesion of articulate language is met with in practice; whilst in the fifth part I have considered the subject in reference to the question of Cause, Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Treatment.

First Argument of the Committee.—On the mistake of those who think that the persistence of the reasoning power, the knowledge of good and evil, and of right and wrong in the insane, involves their responsibility for their criminal acts.

In July 1745 Swedenborg returned to Sweden, and soon afterwards resigned his assessorship, so that he might be at liberty to devote himself to the new function to which he imagined that he had been especially called. Accordingly, all scientific studies and pursuits he now abandoned entirely; all worldly honours and interests he counted worthless; he devoted himself to that sacred office “to which the Lord Himself has called me, who was graciously pleased to manifest Himself to me, His unworthy servant, in a personal appearance in the year 1743; to open in me a sight of the spiritual world, and to enable me to converse with spirits and angels. … Hence it has been permitted me to hear and see things in another life which are astonishing, and which have never come to the knowledge of any man, nor entered into his imagination. I have been there instructed concerning different kinds of spirits, and the state of souls after death—concerning Hell, or the lamentable state of the unfaithful—concerning Heaven, or the most happy state of the faithful, and particularly concerning the doctrine of faith, which is acknowledged throughout Heaven.” He is well aware that many persons will affirm that such intercourse is impossible, and that it must be mere fancy and illusion on his part, but for all this he cares not, seeing that “he has seen, heard, and had sensible experience” of what he declares.