At Dr. Williams' request I have conducted during the past six months a few experiments with the galvanic battery in mental diseases. Thinking the results of these observations will be of service to those who intend pursuing this branch of study, with his permission I take the liberty of recording them.

An important case—“Boughton v. Knight”—in which a will was opposed on the ground of the testator's insanity, has recently occupied the Court of Probate for fourteen days. Without entering into the details of so long a case, we print the summing up of Sir James Hannen, so far as it bears upon the general question of testamentary capacity. After a few introductory remarks, he proceeded as follows:—

J. McB., æt. 21 years. Admitted into the asylum 25th November, 1869. Married, with small family; no member of his family known to have been insane before; light hair, eyes and complexion.

Some time ago I employed my leisure in hunting up all facts which might throw some light on the condition of lunatics in Great Britain in former times. In my then position it was extremely difficult to obtain access to the class of books most likely to yield me the information desired, but from such as did fall in my way all matter of the least value for my purpose was excised. The labour connected with this pursuit was much greater than most might be inclined to credit, and some men of a utilitarian frame of mind may be inclined to believe that labour on such a subject was wasted, and might have been much more profitably expended on other branches of research.

The three establishments which will most repay the trouble of a visit, a e the Bicêtre, the Salpêtriére, and Charenton; The Bicêtre is for male, the Salpêtriére for female paupers, and Charenton is a large private asylum for both sexes.

I have designated the case, a description of which I have the honour of laying before you, as one of Insanity dependent on Syphilis, discarding the generally used term—Syphilitic Insanity. It will be better to state the reasons for so doing after I have given you an account of the patient. I will, however, premise that the Diagnosis is that of a syphilitic tumour or other affection, acting as a foreign body within the cranium. To substantiate this fairly, it seems to me that the presence of intercranial disorder should be made out, and then evidence be sought to determine the nature of that disorder. I have, therefore, endeavoured to classify symptoms as much as possible in accordance with this plan. The general history is as follows:—

Emotional Display in Prisoners.—In proceeding with, our investigation into the rationale of their angry and destructive outbursts, it will be necessary for us to keep in view the exceptional circumstances in which prisoners are placed, and the fact that their passionate demonstrations are frequently but repetitions of the same series of acts in consequence of the limited scope of action afforded by prison life. The readiness with which such emotional conditions are stirred up, and the extravagant results to which they lead, are among the best evidences of mental inferiority among criminals as a class. Indeed, wherever we find such a relative want of proportion and adjustment between states of feeling and their cause on the one hand, and states of outward activity and their consequences on the other, we must look upon it as an indication of inferiority.

The spiritual history of a man is never without interest to his fellows. How a great man lived and moved and had his being; how he met and faced this cunning, cheating world; how he bore himself to his fellows, and how he accomplished the work that lay to his hand; these are matters which are fall of deep interest, of true pathos to men who are amongst their fellows; to men who are striving to live justly and honestly in this present world. Each other life that we come to know and feel with, has not lived for itself, but for us. Other men have suffered that we may be free from pain. The victory of another may be ours through the magic of sympathy. There is a deep perennial truth in this matter of vicarious suffering. We find it illustrated in the sacrifices of all religions, and in the central doctrine of Christianity itself. It is in this aspect that hero-worship is excellent. “We may make our lives divine,” and the way to succeed in that endeavour is by means of a thorough knowledge of, a deep and noble sympathy with, that which is divine in our fellow men. The examples such men leave are indeed noble benefactions to the race. A Peabody bequest is a small thing in comparison with the living records of a life well spent. That being so, the value of biography can be understood, and if the infinite significance of a true life of a real man is appreciated, the sorrow which must be felt on account of the rarity of such works cannot but be great. True there is no lack of so-called “Biographies,” but these fall far short of the requirements of the perfect record of a life. In these, for the most part, we find not the life of a man but a number of the circumstances which he lived through. How these modified him, how he moulded the iron of circumstance, for the most part, we hear not.

The annual account of their stewardship rendered by the Commissioners in Lunacy is always interesting, both to those who make Lunacy a study, and to those who make it a living. Many persons go to these reports keenly interested in the facts and figures set forth, and their medical significance; others see only the social and economic bearing of the statistics, while perhaps a still larger number look with anxious eyes at the praise or blame of themselves or their institutions that is published to the world in those volumes. No thoughtful man can take up one of these reports, however, without having some new ideas suggested to him. To see the records of the mere numbers of our poor human kind of every class and in every place affected with the direst of all diseases has a very saddening and humbling effect on most minds. Who can think of 68,145 insane men and women—the number in the United Kingdom at the end of 1872—and endeavour in the remotest degree to realise the broken hearts, the blasted hopes, the blighted ambitions, the unfinished work, the dead affections of this great army of stricken ones, and their belongings, without feeling very sad at heart? And these things do not half express the true seriousness of the case to the medical mind. The latent and milder cases not included in this list, the vast mass of nervous and bodily disease that has necessarily accompanied so much insanity, the mental eccentricity and obliquity, the degeneration, the immorality, and the crime, which we know must have existed in so many of the families where the insanity occurred—all these things help to darken the picture that rises in one's mind when thinking of the sixty thousand. Two or three bright spots there are it is true. All this misery has roused up a pity that is almost divine, a pity that has assumed a most practical form, and done very much for the care and cure of the disease. Medical science has not been idle in the study of the nature of the disease, and of the best means of its prevention and treatment. Through—as some would say in consequence of, as we would say in spite of—all this disease, we have in every generation a great light rising, a genius among the degenerate, a god among those that are tending to the brutes, to repay all the compassion and care that have been expended on his blood relations by giving new ideas and great thoughts to all the world. The last, and most unquestionably the truest comfort in the matter, though it may seem to the unthinking to savour of the cold heartlessness of pure science, is that all this mass of disease of man's highest organ is one of Nature's ways of keeping the general mass of human kind brain-whole. She cuts off a hand that the whole body may not be destroyed; that the fittest may survive, the unfitting must die.

Mr. Darwin has called his book by the title of “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” but he has gone into the mechanism of other conditions besides “Emotionls.” “Affirmation” and” Negation,” “Reflection,” “Meditation,” and “Helplessness,” are not necessarily associated with “Feeling,” and may more conveniently be called states of mind than emotions. If this had been better recognised it would have prevented the making of such an “antithesis” as Indignation on the one hand and Helplessness on the other. An indignant man is no doubt in an emotional condition, but a man who shrugs his shoulders in sheer help-lessness may be, and generally is, simply devoid of all emotion whatever.

B. A., æt. 52. Admitted January, 1873. Member of a liberal profession.

The following description of Rousseau's madness is taken from the admirable “Life of Rousseau,” by Mr. John Morley, which has been recently published:—

The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarks invariably made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, is that he must be mad.

The subject of this case is a gentleman, 48 years of age, who contracted an infecting chancre in January, 1870. Nothing of any note occurred until the month of April, when a squamous syphilide made its appearance, and at the same time marked mental excitement came on, with an extreme amount of restlessness. This mental condition reached its height during August and September, almost amounting to delirium. The patient took almost no rest in bed, and was in the habit of riding and driving about recklessly during the night. Towards the end of October the excitement began to diminish until, in December, nothing remained to remind one of the dangerous mental condition the patient suffered from five months before. At this time all trace of the secondary syphilide had disappeared.

Dr. George M. Beard, of New York, has delivered lately a lecture on this subject, in which he lays down some propositions in a rather startling form:—

The lecturer began by giving a résumé of papers previously read before the Society, on Young Men in History; an Inquiry into the Relation of Age to Work. He stated that from an analysis of the lives of 1000 representative men in all the great branches of human effort, he had made the discovery that the golden decade was between thirty and forty; the silver between forty and fifty; the brazen between twenty and thirty; the iron between fifty and sixty, and so on. The superiority of youth and middle life over old age in original work appears all the greater when we consider the fact that nearly all the positions of honour, and profit, and prestige—professorships and public stations—and nearly all the money of the world are in the hands of the old. Reputation, like money and prestige, is mainly confined to the old.

Glamorgan.—The feature of this report is the Medical Appendix. Although short, it is interesting, and embodies Dr. Yellowlees' experience of asylum management, &c., during the past five years.