I.—Foreign Psychological Literature

Extract

‘American Journal of Insanity.’—The July number of this Journal has the unusual quality in American literary productions of being made up of original articles by Americans. This is a proper subject of congratulation, for it must be more gratifying to both editors and subscribers that its original articles should be home-grown, and not mere reprints from British periodicals. To ourselves also it is much more satisfactory, on opening this ‘Journal of Insanity,’ to find it occupied with the results of American thought and observation, than with borrowed articles from contemporaneous literature. The very large number of public and private asylums in North America afford a most ample field for study and research, and the numerous learned and skilful physicians who superintend those asylums have no apology for neglecting its cultivation and failing to contribute the fruits of their labour for the benefit of their colleagues practising in the same department, through the medium of the Journal which is supposed to represent the state of psychological medicine in their native land. It is far from our purpose to imply that it is an evil to reproduce in the journals of any one country articles or memoirs appearing in those of other lands; indeed, this section of our own publication proves how far such an idea is from our minds; but it is a very different matter, and attains the magnitude of an evil, when it becomes a custom to occupy the bulk of a periodical with reprints of papers taken bodily from other journals, and not merely in abstract, to the exclusion of original communications. It is an evil long since noticed in many American publications, and has tended, and will tend so long as carried on, to blight original thought and arrest research.