Public opinion will have it that this is a neurotic age, and that insanity is increasing year by year. The facts which have called forth this opinion, and appear to confirm it, are not by any means flattering to our civilisation or to the resistive power of latter-day humanity. The multiplication of asylums, and the numerical increase of the insane written large on the statistical returns of every civilised country during the past decade, apparently admit of no dubiety in regard to this question. It is necessary, therefore, that we should scan these facts more closely, and thus endeavour to ascertain if the increase of lunacy is real or assumed.