Life and mind, in their abstract nature or essence alike inscrutable to us, are problems which belong to the same category; for, in this world, we know nothing of life apart from an organism, and we have no manifestations of mind independently of a brain and nervous system. Here living organisms are required for the display of the vital phenomena, and a brain and nervous system for the manifestations of mind. Life has accordingly been defined as “the collective expression for a series of phenomena which take place exclusively in bodies that are organized,” and “mind as the functional manifestations of the living brain.” But then, and at the outset, it is to be remembered that in affirming sensation, emotion, thought, and volition to be functions of the nervous system, what is really maintained is this, that the vesicular matter of the encephalic ganglia furnishes the material conditions—the medium through which these mental phenomena are made manifest in this life. It may indeed be asked, Are not the physical forces of external nature, which underlie all vital phenomena, and the changing states of consciousness which constitute our mental life, as inscrutable to us in their nature or essence as are life and mind ? and it must be conceded that they are. Matter and force are coexistent, and are correlative. Nor can we conceive of the one but in association with, by, and through the other, any more than we can conceive of life, in our present state of existence, apart from an organism, or of thought independently of a living brain.

The following tables are compiled from the three official lunacy reports of the kingdom, and give (Table I) the total number of lunatics and idiots in England and Wales, in Scotland, and in Ireland, on the 1st January, 1867, with their place of maintenance and (Table II) their distribution per cent. at the same date.

In his address as President of the Medico-Psychological Association Dr. Robertson discusses the various modes of making public provision for the insane poor; and one of the three modes which he recommends is that of disposing of a certain number of them in private dwellings.

Case 1.—S. E—, female. Admitted Jan. 22, 1866. Tried for wounding, with intent to murder, Dec, 1865. Found insane. She lived in a cellar with her husband and child. From the evidence given at the trial and from her own account, it appears that she wounded her child slightly with a razor in order to frighten her husband, who had treated her with great cruelty, into better behaviour. After she had been taken into custody it was found that “her mind was much shaken, and that she was the subject of delusions.”

I quite feel with the Superintendent of Colney Hatch Asylum, as he has said in his first paper, that a “dispassionate consideration of a subject” is the best course to pursue when seeking after “Truth.” Unhappily, stung and provoked by a reply, emanating from a gentleman who, though only an “assistant” physician, has evinced a fitness to attain a higher position, he has soon forgotten the position he started to uphold, and has launched out into an invective that is scarcely to be wished for in the pages of a Journal that lays claim to a scientific character.

I am very loth again to take up the time of the readers of this Journal on the subject of the “treatment of a certain class of destructive patients,” but Dr. Sheppard, in the last number,* has in many places so misunderstood my meaning, and consequently so misrepresented my facts, that I cannot allow his paper to pass without endeavouring briefly to rectify some of the more glaring discrepancies.

Aphasia is the term which has recently been given to the loss of the faculty of articulate language, the organs of phonation and of articulation, as well as the intelligence being unimpaired. The pathology of this affection is at the present time the subject of much discussion in the scientific world; the French Academy devoted several of their séances during the year 1865 to its special elucidation, and the Medical Journals of France and of our own country have lately contained a good deal of original matter bearing upon this obscure feature in cerebral pathology.

The trial of Louis Bordier, a Frenchman, for the wilful murder of the woman with whom he had cohabited for thirteen years, has afforded another painful illustration of the extremely unsatisfactory method of procedure followed in our courts of justice when the insanity of the prisoner is suspected or alleged.

The Alton murderer certainly did no credit to his art. His crime was conceived without ingenuity, and executed in the coarsest manner; the only remarkable features in it being its simplicity and atrocity. On a fine afternoon a clerk in a solicitor's office takes a walk outside the town; he sees some children playing in a field by the roadside; one of these, a lively little girl, between eight and nine years of age, he persuades to go with him into an adjoining hop-garden, and the others he gets rid of by giving them a few halfpennies to go home. In a little while he is met walking home alone, and he returns to his office, where he makes an entry in his diary. But what has become of the little girl? Noone has seen her since she was taken from her playfellows into the hop-field. Her parents become alarmed; they arouse their neighbours, and an anxious search is made for the missing child. It is ascertained that she was last seen on her way to the hop-field, and when the searchers hurriedly proceed there, they find the dismembered fragments of her body scattered here and there. A foot is in one place, a hand in another, the heart and the eyes are picked up after a long search; and some parts of the body cannot be found at all. The poor child had clearly been murdered, and her body cut into pieces; but what she underwent before she was butchered may be suspected but cannot be discovered, because the “vagina was missing.” Suspicion fell directly upon the prisoner, and he was arrested. In his desk was found a diary, and in the diary the following entry just made: “Killed a little girl: it was fine and hot.” Such are the main facts, briefly told, of the murder; it is not surprising that they excited horror and disgust in the public mind, and that the prisoner was denounced as a brutal and unnatural scoundrel, for whom, if he were found guilty, hanging was too good.

The follies and atrocities perpetrated in some parts of Southern Italy, during the epidemic of cholera, by the panic-stricken populace, are a grim satire on the enlightenment of the age. Acting under the ignorant belief that the cholera was propagated amongst them by the authorities or other persons, who either poisoned the wells or infected the air with some deadly poison, they violently attacked and murdered those who became the unfortunate victims of their frantic suspicions. At Ardore, a town in Calabria, on the appearance of the cholera, the people assembled in arms before the druggist's shop, loudly declaring their intention to burn it to the ground. An officerwith a few soldiers in vain attempted to prevent the execution of this design. The mob rushed madly forward, trampled the unfortunate officer to death beneath their feet, set fire to the shop, and ruthlessly butchered the druggist and his family. Twenty other persons also fell victims to the ferocity of the enraged multitude. Similar tumults occurred in other places. At Potentino the mob surrounded the house of a certain Antonio Sabellino, with whom resided his brother Francesco, and a friend, Giacomo di Mattia, accusing them of being poisoners. The rioters broke into the house and searched for the alleged poison. At last they found on a shelf a jar full of paste, which Sabellino kept for poisoning rats. A dog having been made to swallow some of the paste died in a few minutes. This was thought conclusive, and the mob rushed upon the ‘two brothers and their friend and brutally murdered them. In the parish of Oogliano it was firrnly believed that the poisoners went from door to door and blewthe infection through the keyhole. Accordingly a great number of the lower class of people abandoned their houses and camped out in the open air, so that they should not be poisoned; while those who remained at home were constantly firing muskets out of their windows with the idea of paralysing the action of the poison. The authorities and the troops only succeeded after immense efforts in convincing the people of their folly.

The annual report of the Superintendent of Longview Asylum, in the State of Ohio, contains a striking illustration of the deep-rooted repulsion which is felt to a black skin in the United States. A very heavy item in the year's expenditure has been caused by the purchase and fitting up of a house for the coloured insane, who had hitherto, as appears, been confined in the common jail. The superintendent expresses his gratification at the provision of accommodation more in accordance with the dictates of justice and humanity. “Two of the greatest misfortunes that humanity is liable to-insanity and a coloured skin-did not seem to me good and sufficient reason for classing the person so afflicted with malefactors, and it is therefore a matter of sincere rejoicing that a change in the disposition of these persons has been made, and especially that Hamilton County has taken the lead in this matter.” After the passage of a law enforcing suitable provision for the coloured insane, application was made for their reception into the building occupied by the whites. This was thought out of the question by the authorities of the asylum, the strong prejudice against the negro felt by most white people being particularly strong among the inmates of the asylum, It became necessary, therefore, in order to carry out the intention of the legislature, to purchase a separate building, and to fit it up specially for the coloured insane. This was done; and the medical superintendent can now point with pride to the circumstance that all the insane negroes belonging to the county are freely received and kindly treated.

At the Carmarthen Borough Police-court, on Monday, 26th August last, before the Mayor (E. B. Jones, Esq.), J. Bagnall, Esq., and Dr. Lewis, Miss E. H. Lewis, the matron of the Joint Counties Lunatic Asylum, situate near Carmarthen, appeared in answer to a summons charging her with having unlawfully assaulted, on 1st of August last, a lunatic patient confined in that asylum.

We have before us an Act of Parliament, passed at the close of the late session, in connection with our sister institutions for the insane in Ireland, the provisions of which, being of more or less importance to our more distant brethren, we are desirous of analysing as fully as pressure upon our space will permit.