The regions of religion and philosophy are distinct, but by no means opposed. Some professors of the Christian faith may have fallen into the error that revelation and science are antagonistic, but such a position has neither any foundation in fact, nor any countenance in the Divine record. Warnings, no doubt, occur in the apostolic writings under the head of science and philosophy; but these are directed against “science falsely so called“, and such philosophy as is identified with “vain deceit.” There can be no opposition between nature and revelation, inasmuch as the author of both is the same God, who is “light“, and whose essence is “truth”. In examining therefore a mental phenomenon, such as that of Revivalism, as lately exhibited in the northern counties of Ireland, and during whose rise and progress so much of a religious element was developed, it would be, in a manner, impossible to do justice to the subject, without a direct reference to this element; nor will the interests of evangelical truth be injured, by an endeavour to discriminate between the false and the true, the genuine and the factitious, in this singular excitement; neither, I must presume, will the pages of a journal devoted mainly to subjects of a psychological character be diverted from their legitimate application if the Religious Aspect of Ulster Revivalism be introduced to them.

There were in Great Britain in the beginning of 1875 about 72,000 insane persons registered and under control. For the care and treatment of these there are at least 6000 paid officials, whose sole duty it is to act as their attendants and nurses. This is reckoning them as one to twelve patients over all, the usual proportion in County Asylums; the numbers less than this in Poorhouses being made up for by the extra number employed in the care of the wealthier classes.

This sequel of encephalitis lethargica has attracted much attention on account of its great frequency. It was found in 70 out of 129 cases studied by Mme. Lévy. In the earlier pathological studies of the syndrome attention was focussed chiefly on the midbrain; recent researches have proved that the changes in the nervous system are more widespread than were at first apparent.

Hitherto the treatment of post-encephalitis has been profoundly unsatisfactory, and for the most part only palliative.

There are at present in mental hospitals some 200 cases; this is only a fraction of those not certified, and consists of an asocial class impossible to deal with outside a mental hospital.

The object of this paper is to draw attention to the nature of the social conditions that lead respectively to drunkenness and to chronic alcoholism, and to point out that these two phenomena are in great measure related to two distinct types of drinking, differing in origin, differing enormously in social gravity, and corresponding to quite different statistical measures.

How wide-spread and how varied the impression was that was created by the late war between the British Empire and the Boers of South Africa, is a matter of common knowledge. There is no means of arriving at an exact idea of the influence it exerted upon one of the belligerent parties, but, so far as the people of the British Isles are concerned, there is abundant evidence to show that it produced an immediate and very profound, though unlasting, modification of national character and conduct.

Prior to the discovery of the Wassermann reaction it was practically impossible to obtain a correct estimate of the incidence of syphilis amongst the insane, owing to the infrequency of physical signs in specific cases, and the difficulty of obtaining reliable histories. Experience has shown that in a large number of cases a positive Wassermann reaction with the serum may be the only evidence of syphilitic infection; more over, Dr. Mott (Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, vol. vi) has shown that definite skin lesions are comparatively rare in general paralysis of the insane.

This Report includes the transactions which occured during the year 1844. It was presented on the 31st of March, and the public who are interested in lunacy matters, have reason to feel obliged to the Commissioners for the promptness of its preparation and publication.

Music, as a term, suffers much from diffusiveness. When we reflect that, in one sense or another, it denominates anything between the idle notes of the plough boy and the finished performance of an opera singer, between the productions of a Jew's harp and of a cathedral organ, between the playing of two or three foreign tramps and of a Philharmonic Orchestra; when we reflect that man's attitude to music is at one time active and at another passive, and when we also reflect that the acceptance of sound as music by man is largely dependent on his individual views and tastes, we must see how impossible it is to invent a definition of music that will serve as a universal standard, to which we can refer psychological observations without lengthy qualifications and limitations. I put forward this self-evident proposition in order to show how easily we may fall into error in particular considerations, if the term is used generally and without specialisation.

The fact that considerable attention has been drawn of late years, both in the medical and lay press, to the subject of operations undertaken for the relief of idiocy and other mental deficiencies of child-life, must be my excuse for taking up the time of this section with observations resting, not alone upon my own limited experience, but largely on that of others. The operation of craniectomy, or as some prefer to call it linear craniotomy (that is the cutting out of strips of bone from the skull), has, indeed, almost passed from the domain of science to the region of romance, and articles have appeared in several of our popular magazines under such sensational titles as “Creating a Mind,” which have led parents of mentally-deficient children to form extravagant conceptions of the powers of surgery in this direction. It may not, therefore, be inappropriate for medical men to weigh and measure the evidence which has accumulated during the last five years as to the possibilities and impossibilities of operative interference in these cases.