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.

The term spasm was applied by Dr. Cullen, to a state of muscular contraction more violent in degree than is usual in health. Where the contraction is succeeded by relaxation, and immediately repeated without the concurrence of the will, or from natural causes, he applies the term convulsion. Dr. Copland, in his Dictionary, has given a fuller definition, to distinguish convulsions from allied and specific diseases, as tetanus, &c. Andral's definition is similar to Copland's, with this addition, that there is or is not loss of consciousness. When there is loss of consciousness the disease is termed eclampsia, always without foaming at the mouth; by which eclampsia is distinguished from epilepsy.

In a former number of this Journal (No. 11) attention was drawn in a leading article to the breaking up of the Military Lunatic Hospital at Yarmouth, Norfolk, and in the next number I was led to make one or two remarks on the question, actuated by a natural sympathy with the present sad state of my former patients.

Our knowledge of the causes of mental diseases, in spite of the conflicting statements of morbid anatomy, has of late years had a tendency to remove from our minds, many doubts we might have been disposed to retain, as to the important part which the body takes, as an organic system, in the production of those diseases; and the ample results of a persistent and judicious application of therapeutic means, justifies the belief, that as the science of animal chemistry advances, and our knowledge, not merely of ultimate analysis, but of organic synthesis, is enlarged, we may have the gratification of seeing this protean malady deprived of many of its most painful and most formidable symptoms.