I hope that you will agree with me that it is well to seize the occasion of our meeting in this locality to recall the memory of two remarkable physicians who practised for many years in Bristol—one, Dr. Prichard, who distinguished himself not only as an ethnologist, but as the author of by far the best English work on insanity in his generation, who was the most celebrated Medical Commissioner that ever sat at the Lunacy Board, and who produced a profound sensation in the legal and the psychological world by enunciating the doctrine of so-called “Moral Insanity,” the echoes of which have not yet died away, nor are likely to do so as long as crimes are committed, and the question of human responsibility has to be determined. The other, who will be ever remembered by those who knew him as the beloved physician, the late John Addington Symonds, the friend of Prichard, and one who, although not an alienist, felt a keen interest in, and had a great capacity for psychological research, having written several Essays, quite remarkable for their insight into some of those problems in psychology which we are yet far from having solved, and which we discuss with some heat even at the present moment.

My apology for reading this short paper must be, my belief, that at our meetings too few communications are made bearing upon the medical treatment of mental disease.

The operation of counting is so familiar to us, and so easily brought under mental observation, that a definition of what it is in learned terms does not make anything clearer to our minds. The abstract idea in numbers is as many as, five, that is, as many fingers as I have, as many as you have, as many as your mouth and eyes and ears together, or as many as the sepals of the rose.

For many years past the Retreat Committee, whilst constantly improving the structural condition of their hospital, have entirely ceased from extending it by the former practice of adding wing to wing and corridor to corridor.