In the classification of the different forms of insanity, it has been agreed to distinguish two chief groups—the first including those recent and curable psychoses, to which the term diseased process is of a truth applicable—the second including those incurable cases which have run their course, and which, indeed, scarcely merit the term diseased process, representing rather, as they do, permanent vices, the results of past disease. Since, in the first group, the psychoses affect principally the emotional and psycho-motor elements of the nervous system, the diseases belonging to this category have been described as of the character or temper (in its older sense) as against diseases of the intellect, which constitute the second category—these latter being marked chiefly by failure of the intellectual powers.