Tænia solium is common enough in this country in man, but its cystic stage is, I think, met with very infrequently; that is the reason I bring this short paper before the meeting in order to elucidate whether cases of the following kind are met with in any frequency in South Africa.

Some workers have claimed that nalorphine is as potent an analgesic as morphine and does not lead to addiction.

Among not a few less agreeable influences pervading lunatic asylums, there is one under whose effect every person concerned in the general management of those institutions is sure to come, viz., the architectural. No asylum superintendent is to be found, who has not various plans of renovation and improvement for his own institution, who does not see precisely the constructional arrangements which the insane require, and who has not, very generally, floating before his mental vision, asleep or awake, some grand scheme for a model asylum. Nor is this to be wondered at, when it is considered that the asylum building is the machine through and by which the superintendent is to work out and develope his system of moral management; that, in short, it is an instrument of cure, of the adequacy, utility, and perfectness of which he must be the best judge.

Gentlemen,—My first and most pleasing duty in taking this chair is to thank you very warmly for the honour you have done me in placing me here. Recalling the names of those who have occupied this position before me, I am abashed by my sense of my own unworthiness to fill it. When the question of my nomination as President of this Association was mooted, I would fain have stood aside, but the kindly representations of those members who said that it was Ireland's turn for an Annual Meeting made me feel that I could not evade the honourable task which was put upon me, even though I feel that I am very far from being the fittest of my contemporaries to undertake it. I have also been moved to accept your kindness and the distinguished honour you have conferred upon me in the hope that a meeting might be arranged in Dublin in such a way as to further the objects of the Association and to be of advantage to the members, particularly to those who live in Ireland. How far this hope may be fulfilled remains to be seen. I trust, in any case, that our present meeting may be so far successful that all our future Annual Meetings may be working meetings, and that under successors, I hope more competent than myself, the Association may be thereby materially aided in its forward path. For this meeting we have, I am happy to say, a very large and comprehensive programme, the members having heartily seconded the efforts of the General Secretary and myself to bring in good material. I desire no credit for this. I may say, with Montaigne, “I have brought you here a nosegay of sweet flowers; nothing is mine but the string that ties them together.” It is, perhaps, the function of the Chairman of such a meeting as this rather to aid and to suggest discussion than himself to take a very prominent part therein; rather to offer opportunities for others than to make them for himself; rather to be the whetstone than the chisel—

The estimation of vitamin C in the urine has recently been undertaken on a fairly large scale on patients suffering from physical disturbances. Harris (1) and his co-workers investigated 74 hospital patients at Cambridge, and found that 62 (84%) excreted less than the minimum standard, or 13 mgrm. per day. Excluding 19 on special diets, 43 excreted less than 13 mgrm. per day, and the average excretion of 55 was 10 mgrm. per day.

In the Sixty-fifth Report (1909) of the Commissioners in Lunacy for England and Wales, the following observations were made in respect of the incidence of cancer in mental hospitals and in the general population:

“There remains one morbid condition which is responsible for an increasing number of deaths in the general community, from which it would almost appear as if the insane enjoyed some immunity. According to these figures, the proportion of deaths from “cancer,” i.e., from all forms of malignant disease, was in asylums 36.4 per 1,000, which may be compared with the ratio of 99.4 per 1,000 in the rest of the community, the disparity being more marked in the female than in the male sex. Although the mortality-rates per 1,000 living show a rate of 2.98 amongst the insane, and of 1.39 in the others, yet having regard to the great divergence between the general death-rates in the two series, the general cancer mortality in relation to that of the insane is not 1.39, but 8.11. Upon what can this difference depend? Is it because, as suggested in the analogous case of bronchitis, the asylum patient is protected from some unknown factor in the development of this disease; or has it to do with mode of living as well as of environment; or can it be that there is any antagonism between the conditions favourable to the development of cancer and those which conduce to insanity? At any rate, in view of these statistics, which seem valid and are confirmatory of those we published two years ago, a thorough investigation of the subject might not be without profit.”