The modern conception of asylums as hospitals for the treatment of those diseases whose salient phenomena are mental, and the fact that insane patients are peculiarly liable to be attacked by ordinary physical diseases, for which they must be treated in asylums, render it essential that these institutions should in their organisation and equipment be approximated to general hospitals as closely as their peculiar circumstances allow. In general hospitals nowadays the pathological department takes a position the importance of which is increasing every year, owing to the extraordinary progress in all branches of pathological science, and it is just as important that this department should be efficiently worked in asylums. Its functions may be said to be twofold, clinical and what we may roughly call anatomical.