must be at fault before the organ fails.  Hence the art of healing should aim at grappling with the neuroses first, for the local trophic changes, perverted secretions, and structural abnormalities are the effects or symptoms, not the causes of the disease.  Dr. J.L.  Thudicum has studied the chemical constitution of the brain, and he holds that, “When the normal composition of the brain shall be known to the uttermost item, then pathology can begin its search for abnormal compounds or derangements of quantities.”  The great diseases of the brain and spine, such as general paralysis, acute and chronic mania, and others, the author believes will all be shown to be connected with special chemical changes in neuroplasm, and that a knowledge of the composition and properties of this tissue and of its constituents will materially aid in devising modes of radical treatment in cases in which, at present, only tentative symptomatic measures are taken.

The whole drift of recent brain inquiry sets toward the notion that the brain always acts as a whole, and that no part of it can be discharging without altering the tensions of all the other parts; for an identical feeling cannot recur, for it would have to recur in an unmodified brain, which is an impossibility, since the structure of the brain itself is continually growing different under the pressure of experience.

Insanity is a disease of the most highly differentiated parts of the nervous system, in which the psychical functions, as thought, feeling, and volition, are seriously impaired, revealing itself in a series of mental phenomena.  Institutions for the insane were at first founded for public relief, and not to benefit the insane; but this idea has changed in the past, and there is a growing feeling that a natural and domestic abode, adapted to the varying severity of the different degrees of insanity, should be the place for the insane, with some reference to their wants and necessities, and that many patients (not all) could be better treated in a domestic or segregate asylum than in the prison-like structures that so often exist, and that the asylum should be as much house-like and home-like in character as the nature of the insanity would permit; while exercise and feeding are accounted as among the best remedies in some cases of insanity, particularly in acute mania.

The new disease called morbus Thomsenii, of which I wrote in my report last year, has been carefully studied by several men of eminence, and the following conclusions have been reached as to its pathology:  The weight of the evidence seems to prove that it is of a neuropathic rather than a myopathic nature, and that it depends on an exaggerated activity of the nervous apparatus which produces muscular tone, and that it has much analogy to the muscular phenomena of hysterical hypnosis, the genesis of which is precisely explained by a functional hyperactivity of the nervous centers of muscular activity.  Until quite recently