The first duty of your President is to say thank you and this I do with great sincerity. To be elected President of this historic association is indeed an honour, and I very much appreciate it.

This case has shown so great an improvement by symptomatic treatment with parasympathetic stimulants and a sympathetic depressant that it seems worthy of record for its own value, apart from the interesting investigations to which it leads.

This paper has, at least, the quality of the unusual. It is a protest from a criminologist of repute against the holding of post-mortem examinations in cases where the cause of death can be inferred with reasonable probability from other evidence. The author is particularly opposed to the provision of the Prussian law which requires autopsies for legal purposes to be performed by two doctors in the presence of a magistrate. The grounds of objection appear to be partly sentimental and partly economical. If such a thing were conceivable about a German professor, one might suspect a ponderous jeu d'esprit.

The present portion of this paper deals with the subject of progressive and secondary dementia. It includes the consideration of those cases of mental disease which, owing to the existence of certain extra-neuronic encephalic morbid states, do not develop a practically stationary condition of mental enfeeblement consequent on the loss of a proportion of the higher cortical neurones, but undergo a more or less rapidly progressive process of neuronic dissolution, which, if the patient survives to such a stage, finally ends in gross dementia.

Examples of true hysteria are relatively rare in asylum populations, and in the present series of cases there are but six instances amongst the 728 patients, and all these are of the female sex. The writer has, however, during his asylum experience, seen more than one case of genuine hysteria in the male sex.

More than two years have elapsed since the Szondi test material became available on the home market, but it seems that the widespread use of the test has been considerably delayed by the lack of a translation of Dr. Szondi's books (1, 2). Susan Deri's Introduction to the Szondi Test (3), which appeared last year, may, however, have enabled some who felt attracted by the test to acquaint themselves with it. The purpose of Deri's book is to give some guidance for the clinical handling of the test and for its interpretation. For the rationale she refers to Szondi's own books.

The system of exchange with other journals has enabled us to increase the number of periodicals from which we may cull matter for these excerpta, and may hope to maintain and to increase their interest and usefulness among our readers. Moreover, we shall not restrict our choice of extracts to the contents of foreign journals only, but extend it also to essays, brief memoirs, and to the summaries of the contents of works of more considerable magnitude which come before us, with the intention of more fully representing the state of opinion and practice prevailing on the Continent and in America, with regard to whatever concerns the pathology and treatment of insanity and the management of asylums. And it is another portion of our design, when detailing the opinions and labours of our fellow-workers in psychiatry in other countries, as far as practicable, to form an estimate of them by the light of, and in comparison with, those of our own countrymen; in other words, to attempt a critical examination of their value and importance.

Nicole and Fitzgerald's assumption in 1932 that the Wassermann test had at last passed to rest in the limbo of historically interesting experiments can hardly be said to be correct, and the test still remains to-day as the standard method for the sero-diagnosis of syphilis. At the same time the steadily increasing specificity of flocculation tests and their value as ancillary procedures cannot be denied, and the accepted diagnostic ideal is a parallel examination by one of these and by the Wassermann test.

The valuable report on the history and condition of the McLean Asylum for the Insane for the year 1858, derives a peculiar importance from the few pages which the Superintendent devotes to the causes of insanity, so far as they were developed and affected by the peculiar circumstances of the year, and were connected with the recent financial crisis and the religious excitements of that period. Dr. Tyler discourses wisely upon these matters, and gives admonitions which, were they heeded, would save many from mental disturbance and more from mental death.