Gentlemen, in providing this paper I have felt many difficulties, for, while wishing in no way to protect shirkers, I wanted to avoid sending men into the army who were almost certain to break down under training, or at the front.

All the experiments for this investigation were carried out by me in the Bacteriological Laboratories at Guy's Hospital, and my thanks are due to Dr. Eyre, the Director, for having placed every facility at my disposal, and to Dr. Ryffel, the Chemical Pathologist, for his advice and assistance. I am also indebted to my Board of Management and to my Medical Superintendent, Dr. Caldecott, for their courteous permission to undertake this investigation in the case of patients resident under their care at the Royal Earlswood Institution, at Redhill, in Surrey.

Our knowledge of whether a person is normal, or suffers from neuritis, or is a case of dementia praecox, is derived entirely from observations of how he reacts to his environment—that is, to various stimuli. The thought at the basis of these researches is that an attempt may be made to produce an environment where the results will be accurately recorded in a simple, direct way.

I much appreciate the honour of being allowed to supplement your more formal courses of study with regard to mental defectives by a few biographical particulars and personal reminiscences of one who may be designated as the pioneer in their training, and the earliest exponent of the educational principles essential to their mental development. I may add that the principles Séguin laid down some seventy years ago apply to a far wider range than the instruction of imbeciles, and I shall hope to show that his master mind anticipated many of the modern methods which of late years have been accepted by the educational world as recent discoveries. As Mr. Holman well puts it in the opening sentence of his admirable book (1) on Séguin (to which I would at once express my appreciative acknowledgments), “The world has not infrequently had to rediscover its great men after they were dead, though their works lived after them.” The voice of Séguin was indeed, in his own day, at any rate as far as general educational science was concerned, as of one crying in the wilderness, and was even derided by the self-satisfied educationalists of the time. His ideas were indeed in advance of the age in which he lived; but what joy would it have been to him to see a summer school of earnest students of the subject nearest to his heart!

It was in 1862 that Maurice Raynaud first made public his description of the condition with which his name has since been associated, and his Thesis for the Doctorate in Medicine has now become a classic in medical literature (1). Although there may be meticulous critics who will dispute his claim to priority in the delineation of the disease-complex known as Raynaud's disease, there can be no doubt that it was he who first succinctly and clearly described the condition. To use a phrase which is apposite in dealing with such a subject—it was Raynaud who first drew a “line of demarcation” between the symptoms characteristic of his syndrome and those typical of gangrenes in general. In his own words, he was dealing with “a very limited corner of the general history of gangrenes.” In the present paper it is proposed to remain within still stricter limitations, yet even there the amount of clinical material is not inconsiderable. There is an additional interest, too, from the fact that Raynaud, especially in his later researches (2), became more and more convinced that the explanation of the peripheral symptoms should be sought in some change in the central nervous system.

Here we shall consider the effect of shame; then try to discover why we feel it at certain times, and whether it can be represented as the development of any other emotion.

The subject of this paper is the criteria of an accused person's fitness to plead to an indictment charging him with some criminal offence. It is a consideration of the questions which are involved in the special verdict of “insane on arraignment.” We shall see, however, that in this connection the word “insane” is used in an extended sense.