This is a description of a case of depression associated with post-encephalitic Parkinsonism, with signs predominating on the left side, treated by unilateral (right) prefrontal leucotomy.

The growing incidence of juvenile delinquency during the past years has become a serious concern of the general public and the authorities. Following the lead taken by the Home Office, a number of local authorities, child guidance clinics and welfare agencies have instituted inquiries into the causes and conditioning factors of juvenile crime from the social, economic and medico-psychological points of view. The institutions for the mentally defective have been faced with the same problem through the increasing number of cases referred by the juvenile courts, and Dr. D. Turner, in his Annual Report on the Royal Eastern Counties Institution, Colchester, for the year 1943, called attention to the difficulties of their management within an institution of the usual type. The question calls urgently for a settled policy regarding their disposal and treatment, and it goes without saying that this can only be attained on the ground of a better insight into the psychology of the delinquent defective.

An Insulin Clinic for treating female schizophrenics by insulin coma therapy has been working now for over two years, and although it is too short a time to draw conclusions as to the ultimate benefit to the patient, some points may be of interest.

Though English is the language of the citizens of the U.S.A., it would be rash to assume that their reading vocabulary was identical in its familiarity with that of the citizens of the British Isles. Hence it is possible that a vocabulary test which is suitable for discriminating among adults in the U.S.A. may not be as suitable for that purpose among adults in this country. A critical examination of the Shipley-Hartford test seems called for, in order that the test may be used with success on this side of the Atlantic.

From the point of view of the psychiatrist, if not from that of the general public, which still needs much education, Child Guidance Clinics have two quite distinct functions: one, diagnostic and advisory, the other, treatment by psychotherapy.

Certain disturbances of a higher order, e.g. aphasia and agnosia, follow as a rule a lesion of the left hemisphere in right-handed persons and vice versa. This dominance of one hemisphere for certain functions has been well established from abundant material. The Gerstmann Syndrome, recently studied, seems to obey the same rule of dominance; other disorders, such as the attitude toward paralysed limbs and defective functions, appear to be caused by lesions of the non-dominant hemisphere. The relations of the latter group, however, to the hemisphere cannot be regarded as firmly established, since the material presented is still limited.

On studying the behaviour of mental defectives one cannot fail to note that their deficiency is not confined to the intellectual or emotional plane. They are clumsy not only in their way of thinking and reasoning, but also in their bodily movements. Their muscular co-ordination and their manual dexterity are poor; they are awkward in their rhythmic work, and they rarely reach average standard at games. Their ocular movements show much the same shortcomings. They are sluggish at following a moving object with the eyes, they easily lose sight of the finger which they should fixate, and they are equally clumsy when they are called upon to look at will at an object in the fringe of their visual field. In some feeble-minded defectives of medium or even higher grades this inability may be clearly reminiscent of motor apraxia in other spheres of neuro-muscular functioning. More often than not precisely these patients are found to be particularly backward readers, able to decipher short words only and incapable of grasping the meaning of a printed sentence.