” In a recent murder trial at Los Angeles, California, one William Edward Hickman was indicted for the murder of a young schoolgirl. At the trial an attempt, which appears to have been unsuccessful, was made to set up a defence of insanity (dementia praecox).

Physiologists, when experimenting with the frog, customarily make selection of one sex. This, being done to ensure constancy of experimental conditions, presumes the possible existence of a sexual modification of results—a presumption I find justified, for, having over many years simply selected the frog of largest size, which one day was male and another female, I can record the following variations of results according to sex.

It is a matter of common observation that dementia præcox, in common with many other forms of dementia, pursues a very chronic course. In fact, the slow progress of the process is one of its outstanding features. In most cases of dementia præcox, no matter how sudden and acute the onset may be, the tendency is for this to subside after a varying period of time.

I have read with interest and appreciation the brief paper on “Focal Infection in Relation to Mental Disease “(vide Journ. Ment. Sci., April, 1929, p. 267) contributed by Drs. Kopeloff and Kirby, whose work, along with that of their colleague, Dr. Cheney, is familiar to English and American psychiatrists.

In the present communication I propose to consider the nature of the excitation processes mediating the thoughts of people, met with in all walks of life, who are distinguished from others by their enthusiasm for certain things, or ideas. For example, the person in love is distinguished from others by his, or her, enthusiasm for a particular individual of the opposite sex. The process of developing that enthusiasm, or of falling in love, I take to be a perfectly natural process to which everyone is susceptible, but, love being blind, it becomes of interest to consider how that blindness is brought about.

Some of you may be wondering why a man who writes novels should be asked to make a speech on behalf of the Tavistock Square Clinic, and I must admit that I have been cudgelling my brains to find a satisfactory answer. The reason, however, is now clear to me. This Clinic, as you know, deals with functional nervous disorders. That also seems to be the province of the modern novelist, judging from the character of our library fiction. Some of these Constant Nymphs, these Lily Christines, the heroes and heroines of our Flaming Youth and Young Anarchy, are in urgent need of treatment by Dr. Crichton Miller and his colleagues. Readers of Mr. Michael Arlen and Mr. Aldous Huxley must imagine that passion of the most disordered kind is running riot in society and the suburbs, and that morals have been abandoned from Mayfair to Mitcham.