A well-known novelist recently made the cogent statement that nothing that happens is important except as it happens to some person. Just as there is no sound without an ear to hear it, so there is no behaviour without some person to observe or experience it. We may elaborate this thought into the dogmatic statement that no behaviour is important except in terms of its social value. While this is not strictly true of those intimate experiences which take place within the self as a unique organism, nevertheless even such intimate personal behaviour is irrelevant to everyone else except in terms of its social impact.

There are in the wards of every mental hospital numbers of persons who for long periods of time exhibit profound disorders of emotion. Thus, we note the fixed depression of the melancholic, the boisterous exuberance of the manic, and the mechanical indifference of the primary dement.

The employment of malaria as a therapeutic agent in the treatment of general paralysis has focused attention on the latter disease and has provided much material for thought. A discussion on the prognosis and treatment of general paralysis was sponsored by the Association at the quarterly meetings in November, 1928, and February, 1929. The Sections of Psychiatry and Neurology of the Royal Society of Medicine had a similar discussion at the same time, and quite recently the Neurological Section of the Royal Society of Medicine debated the unsettled problems of neuro-syphilis, when the President, in summing up, remarked, “Our problems still remain unsettled”.

“Unfitness to plead” is a medico-legal proposition of practical importance to prison medical officers. My attention was drawn to it, shortly after I joined the Service, in a case tried at the Central Criminal Court. Since then I have frequently had to take the responsibility of forming an opinion and reporting as to prisoners' fitness or unfitness to plead, and recently my interest in this problem has been re-aroused by a case tried at the Manchester Assizes, the outcome of which I had discussed with my colleagues and also with members of the Bar.

According to the accepted description, a tic is a psychogenic symptom, an expressive movement derived from a mental fixation. This concept was rejected by some of those authors who observed tic-like movements as sequelæ of acute encephalitis. Other cases, quoted by Steck (I), in which the onset of a hyperkinetic encephalitis was associated with tics, suggested still more definitely that there might be an organic cause for such movements. An extreme concept localized the lesion responsible for these symptoms in the corpus striatum. This wholesale assumption was in turn objected to from the neurological standpoint, particularly by Kinnier Wilson (2), who, in his well-known paper, pointed out how complicated the possible connections were. In particular he mentioned that even tics following encephalitis might be conditioned not only by the brain disease itself, but also by constitutional and psychic factors. The network of different ætiological factors becomes less complicated when a disease like chorea is studied, rather than cases of encephalitis where widespread permanent lesions remain. We have, therefore, studied the occurrence of tics in connection with chorea, though we do not claim that any conclusions can be drawn from these observations for tic neuroses generally.

For many years past, much research has been undertaken into the structure and functions of the blood-cell elements with a view to ascertaining whether there are any regular quantitative and qualitative changes in the cells, which would prove of diagnostic and prognostic value in the psychoses.

My aim in abstracting the material for this article from experiments with upwards of 350 subjects has been to offer a few additions to the deductions it is possible to make from the Rorschach test, and to criticize and evaluate its general aims. The number of subjects studied approached that from which Rorschach derived the conclusions embodied in his monograph Psychodiagnostik. Among these is a group of 100 normals, the investigation of which should afford an interesting combination with the findings obtained by P. E. Vernon from an equal number of similar subjects.

The application of the above test to epileptics is a useful subject for an article, firstly because Rorschach's findings for epileptics were established from a very small number of patients; secondly, there was, in his investigations, no subdivision of epileptics into mental categories other than those of “early” and “late” demented; thirdly, the references in literature to the application of this test to epileptics are so meagre; and fourthly, the results obtained in this particular investigation show a considerable diversity from those of Rorschach.