Professor Pfitzner has continued his interesting “social anthropological studies” at the Strasburg Anatomical Institute by an attempt to investigate the influence of social rank and of creed, an attempt not without difficulties, owing to the slight range of social class among the persons dying in hospital, and the absence of any fit standards of comparison among persons of higher social class. As regards the latter point he has, so far as size of head is concerned, reached certain results, though not without the expenditure of much time and diplomacy in gaining information from hatters, in the course of which he was compelled to acquire a large number of hats. He found that while the sizes of very cheap hats range very well with the sizes of the heads of his subjects at the Anatomical Institute, the more expensive hats have a different and higher range of size. He himself possesses a remarkably large head, and he finds it impossible to obtain a hat that fits him among the very cheap class of goods, even the manufacturers, when the tradesmen offered to procure the article desired, being unable to supply the right size; but among the expensive class of hats he has no difficulty in finding one to fit him, or even one that is too large. He concludes, therefore, that the well-to-do social classes have larger heads than the lower social classes. In a somewhat similar manner, by acquiring skill in estimating the height of well-to-do persons as they passed his shoulder in the street, he was able to convince himself that the hospital subjects are short as compared with the well-to-do, and that, in fact, heights which are fairly common among the latter practically never occur at all among the former.

Professor Penta has for many years been occupied in studying criminals in the prisons of Naples, one of the most favourable regions in Europe for such studies. In the present paper he sets down some of the latest of his general conclusions on the subject of the nature of criminality. These conclusions differ widely in many respects from those of Lombroso. He notices in the first place that he finds a very great difference between those prisoners who are confined in establishments reserved for minor offenders and those, convicted of more serious offences, who are confined in the convict prisons; the first are a much more dangerous class than the second, much more incorrigible, and much more often lacking in moral sense. He finds also that while the first group—the more dangerous persons who only commit slight offences,—come mainly from the cities, the others come from the country. The individuals of the first group also belong in much larger proportion to the class considered by Lombroso to be merely insane. So that the offence and its punishment, taken by themselves, furnish a very fallacious criterion for diagnosis and treatment.

In this paper Professor Tschisch sets forth his conception of pain as a form of death. Pain, he points out, does not depend on the intensity of the stimulus; a Paquelin cautery at a white heat causes much less pain than at a lower temperature. The really significant fact is that those chemical substances which produce pain kill living tissues. Pain is bound up with the existence of nerves, and appears before the tissue is killed; so it is that it arises under comparatively weak stimulation, while strong stimulation produces death. “Those chemical substances which excite no pain cannot kill any living tissue. Every chemical agent which changes living tissue into dead arouses pain.” Thus it is that excitations like strong light, loud sounds, repulsive smells, cause no pain; while heat, cold, mechanical and electrical stimuli, poisons, arouse pain. It is true that some poisons cause no pain; such poisons, however, do not act directly on living tissue; those which act directly on living tissue, like corrosive sublimate, produce pain. Pain is thus the first reaction of the organism to stimuli which kill living tissue; it is the guardian of the organism, the messenger which brings warning of approaching danger; it announces that death has already begun to appear.

Professor van Biervliet has now completed his very careful study of right-sidedness and left-sidedness (already summarised in the Journal) by a still more careful investigation of ambidextrous persons. In the first place by photography, according to a special and uniform method, he finds that in the ambidextrous the two sides of the face, as well as the arms, are fairly alike, the face being slightly more developed on the right side, as among left-sided people, but not in so marked a degree. They occupy much the same position, indeed, throughout the investigation. When compared with right-sided and left-sided people as regards sensory acuteness, it is found that while the right-sided have predominant sensory acuteness on the right side, both the left-sided and the ambidextrous can see further, hear better, possess more acute tactile and muscular sense, on the left side, so that ambidexterity may be regarded as a variety of left-sidedness of more symmetrical anatomical type. In all respects the ambidextrous almost or quite resembled the left-sided.

Féré has always consistently upheld the doctrine that states of fatigue constitute the physical basis of very many psychoses and neuroses. His experimental work has largely been devoted to the illustration of this relationship, and he has lately carried out, in accordance with an elaborate but uniform method, a long series of observations showing the results of very various stimuli in affecting fatigue, as measured by work done.