Gentlemen,—In now opening the eighth section of this great International Medical Congress, and in offering to the alienists of Europe and America our cordial welcome to London, I must ask leave to explain to you that it is only by the accident of official position as senior physician to the Lord Chancellor, who, under the Royal prerogative and by statute, has in England the guardianship of all lunatics and persons of unsound mind, that I occupy to-day this presidential chair. But for the desire of the Executive Committee thus to recognise the paramount authority of the Lord Chancellor in our department of medicine, I cannot doubt that the place I now fill would have been allotted to our most distinguished English writer on lunacy, Dr. J. C. Bucknill, one of the vice-presidents of this Congress, whose writings and whose name are a household word in all the asylums where the English tongue is spoken. Called from my official position rather than from personal fitness to preside in this section, I may the more venture to ask at your hands a generous interpretation of my efforts, so to guide your deliberations here that they may advance the science and practice of this department of medicine in which we are all enrolled.

In the following cases, visual or auditory hallucinations, or both, were more or less vivid and persistent. First the visual, and then the auditory, will be considered, together with the lesions of the respective supposed cortical centres.

Before the circulation of the blood was discovered, the pathology of diseases of the heart must have been unknown, and their treatment empirical and of little effect. Before the discovery of the glycogenic function of the liver, the pathology of diabetes remained a mystery, and its treatment a matter of guess-work. In all dealings with the facts of life, the science of the normal must precede the science of the abnormal. In the domain of mental operations the science of the normal is of very modern discovery, and Alienism, the science of the abnormal, has consequently been until recently compelled to limit itself to collections of materials for future use, and to tentative groupings of these materials which have necessarily been provisional on their harmonizing with the future developments of the science.