The treatment of the insane without isolation in side rooms has received much attention in Germany (Kalmus, Zellenlose Behandlung; Halle, Marhold, Psychiat. Wochensch., No. 49, 1900; Bresler, ibid., No. 10, 1901; Hoppe, ibid., No. 30, 1901). The general conclusion is that such confinement is to be avoided as much as possible, but that it is quite the right treatment in some cases.

An important event in the year has been the meeting of an International Congress for Criminal Anthropology at Amsterdam. I leave the various discussions and papers to be dealt with in another part of this Journal. It is generally admitted that an efficient staff of attendants and nurses is indispensable in the treatment and care of the insane. This important point has been the subject of an exhaustive and lengthy report in our Journal. A number of questions were drawn up and sent to the medical superintendents of several asylums, and the answers received were cast into a very interesting report in which we find a large number of data relating to the training of attendants, their pay, leave of absence, amusements, working hours, board and lodging, etc. The conclusion drawn by the writer of the report is that very great progress has been made; “contrary to what occurred nine years ago, the care for the insane is now everywhere entrusted to a staff well trained for their task, or at least in receipt of thorough training for their onerous duties.” I can hardly believe that these words of the writer will be generally accepted. Undoubtedly great progress has been made, but there is still room for much improvement. The maid-of-all-work, who dons the dress of a nurse and is henceforth styled “Sister Sarah,” does not at the same time acquire the amount of knowledge and training required in a nurse; you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and in a large number of cases the sow's bristles show through the silk envelope.

Last year, in my epitome of the work accomplished in the fields of psychiatry and neurology, I endeavoured to give a general idea of the geographical distribution of the more important centres of study and work, showing their chief characteristics, their diverse tendencies, and the nature of their publications and journals. I thought that once having accomplished this, I would be enabled, in following years, to deal systematically with the work done, but I feared that in doing so my production would run the risk of being incomplete and not sufficiently precise. I am obliged, therefore, again to follow the plan I adopted last year, but in place of noting mere general tendencies and characteristics, I propose to note the real progress in these branches of science.

Since my last report (in 1898) to this Journal no important changes have taken place in the care and treatment of the lunatics in this country.

Developing an observation of Frassetto, which suggested shortness of the hallux as an atavistic stigma in criminals, Lombroso has investigated the relative lengths of the hallux and the second digit in series of normal and abnormal individuals.

The authoress has studied the characters of the pelvis in sixteen skeletons of male criminals in Lombroso's museum. In her paper she gives the details of the examination in each case, with tables summarising the results for the whole series. She finds that the pelvis in the criminal tends to approximate to the female type; and, though this type is generally admitted to be morphologically higher than the male type, she argues that the lack of sexual differentiation implied by this resemblance is to be properly regarded as an atavistic character, especially as it is in many cases associated with other peculiarities of a distinctly prehuman kind.

The elaborate and important anthropological investigations made during recent years by Prof. Pfitzner at the Anatomical Institute of Strasburg are well known. The present study deals with sexual differences in hair and eye colour, and in proportions of body and head, difference in age being always taken into account; and, from the care with which it has been carried out, and the large number of subjects dealt with, the study constitutes a valuable contribution to our knowledge of this subject. As the author himself points out, certain sources of error exist; we are dealing with dead subjects only, in a hospital, so that there has been “selection by death” and “selection by hospital;” but even when we bear these sources of disturbance in mind the results remain very instructive. A few of the points brought out in this lengthy paper may here be mentioned.

After a retrospect of previous work on anencephalous births, Dr. Muralt proceeds to describe the skull and brain of two of those monstrosities. The first, a male child, born at full time, lived for two days, during which he cried lustily, swallowed, and showed the usual muscular motions and reflexes. His head resembled that of a cat, no forehead, the face prognathous, the nose and lips thick, and the eyes prominent. The head was covered with thick hair, and there was no roof to the cranium. The rudiments of the brain were shut in by a soft membrane. These structures are pictured in a large lithograph sheet, and their description fills seventeen pages of the Archiv.

Dr. Probst begins by remarking that he can only find two cases before that described by Rokitansky, in 1858, in which the corpus callosum was deficient, one by Reil in 1812, and one by Ward in 1846. He apparently has overlooked the case mentioned in Solly's book on the brain in 1827, and another by Paget in 1846. If Dr. Probst had lighted upon the excellent paper by Dr. Alexander Bruce, recorded in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. xv, pp. 320—341, he would have been able greatly to add to the sixteen cases which he has mentioned. I have myself seen an instance of complete deficiency of the corpus callosum in the brain of a deaf woman who died in the Stirling District Asylum. There are at least six cases (Probst only knows of two) in which, without any mental deficiency or loss of sensory or motor power being observed during life, the corpus callosum was found to be entirely wanting.

At the meeting of German neurologists and alienist physicians in Baden-Baden, June, 1901, Dr. Bethe, of Strasburg, explained that during the last decade a new nerve-cell theory had come into vogue. It was assumed that the so-called neuron was an anatomical, functional, pathological, and developmental entity. But it had been shown by Apáthy that there is a direct and intimate connection between the neurons through the primitive nerve-fibrillæ, and Dr. Bethe himself had demonstrated that in the carcinas mænas the nervous system performs its function without any ganglion cells. Thus the cell cannot be a necessary instrument in the process like the pendulum of a clock, or the wheel of a watch. Nissl has shown that the observations of pathologists give no sure support to the neuron theory. Further objections may be taken from the fact that several organs are affected after section of the nerves supplying them. In the case of degeneration of muscles and glands, it may be said that this process may be owing to atrophy from inactivity of their functions; but degeneration of the papillæ circumvallatæ et foliatæ of the tongue in the rabbit has been observed to follow, in from about two to three weeks after section of the glossopharyngeals, although the stimulus has not ceased to be applied to these organs. From this it appears that the pathological process goes further than the boundary of the neuron.

The work, which has led to the production of this excellent monograph, has occupied the author for three years. It has finally been brought to a conclusion at Claybury, and is one of the best pieces of work which has yet hailed from that laboratory. Dr. Bolton has bestowed an enormous amount of industry and care upon his work, and it is a difficult task to do justice to it in an epitome.

The first lecture dealt with the general composition of nervous structures. Grey matter contains 80—90 per cent. of water, and 50 per cent. of the total solids are proteid. In white matter there is less water and less proteid, and in peripheral nerves is least water and least proteid. The most abundant proteid is a nucleo-proteid containing ·5 per cent. of phosphorus, but there is little of this in the white matter. The other two proteids are globulins, one of which coagulates at 47° C.

This is an anatomical study of two heads by the sectional method, special attention being directed to the exact position of the lateral ventricles. The author is one of the New York medical students.

Lecture I.—After a brief historical summary of the growth and conception of the neuron theory, the lecturer prefaces his observations upon degeneration of the neuron with a short account of the minute histology of the nervous system as revealed by modern methods.

The case, a woman æt. 62, alcoholic, presented the following clinical history:—Six years ago she had a right-sided hemiparesis, followed by a second similar attack in two years. Three years ago she had a weakening of the voice ending in aphonia, followed by dysarthria and dysphagia. There were also paresis of the lower facial muscles, especially on the right side, without atrophy, paresis of the tongue and palate. In addition to the right-sided hemiparesis, there was latterly paresis of the left leg.

The work is divided into six parts. In the first part, an account is given of the varying results obtained by Nissl's method of staining, concerning the minute anatomy of the nervous cell and its lesions. The numerous modifications of this method were tried, and Ladame places most reliance on the method of Van Gehuchten, which he has altered in certain details; so that, for instance, instead of washing in water after fixation he carries his specimens into 60 per cent. alcohol saturated with chloride of sodium; whence, after leaving them in this bath for a while, they are placed in 70 per cent. alcohol, also saturated with chloride of sodium. He uses, moreover, essence of cedar in preference to chloroform as the vehicle of paraffin for embedding, in spite of certain drawbacks. Toluidine blue is used instead of methylene blue for staining the sections, and gives a neat, intense coloration, agreeable to the eye; moreover it is more stable than methylene blue.

These experiments were made on 238 boys and 224 girls, between the ages of 9 and 14, in the schools at Kiel. Eight different kinds of memory were investigated, involving in each group a test of the ability to remember in exact order nine sensory impressions (nine objects exhibited in succession, nine figures repeated, nine names of visual objects repeated, nine names of states of feeling, nine difficult unknown words, etc.). Among the boys the average order of excellence reached was as follows (in decreasing values): real things, figures, words referring to touch, visual words, words representing sounds, actual sounds, words referring to feelings, difficult words. In every group (except that of objects exhibited) there was a regular improvement with age. In regard to objects seen, sounds heard, and representations of feeling, there was a marked improvement in memory about the thirteenth year. The memory for figures, and for sound-words, touch-words, and feeling-words, showed most rapid development at an earlier age (ten to eleven years). There was no tendency to a simultaneous development in all the groups; mental energy seemed to be concentrated on one group at a time.

The author has devised a method by which the memories of individuals may be compared to one another or to a perfect standard. His method tests the memory for words, persons, colours, orientation, names, and numbers.

These experiments were made on 238 boys and 224 girls, between the ages of 9 and 14, in the schools at Kiel. Eight different kinds of memory were investigated, involving in each group a test of the ability to remember in exact order nine sensory impressions (nine objects exhibited in succession, nine figures repeated, nine names of visual objects repeated, nine names of states of feeling, nine difficult unknown words, etc.). Among the boys the average order of excellence reached was as follows (in decreasing values): real things, figures, words referring to touch, visual words, words representing sounds, actual sounds, words referring to feelings, difficult words. In every group (except that of objects exhibited) there was a regular improvement with age. In regard to objects seen, sounds heard, and representations of feeling, there was a marked improvement in memory about the thirteenth year. The memory for figures, and for sound-words, touch-words, and feeling-words, showed most rapid development at an earlier age (ten to eleven years). There was no tendency to a simultaneous development in all the groups; mental energy seemed to be concentrated on one group at a time.