C. J. Jung and the Humanities: Toward a Hermeneutics of Culture (Routledge, London, £25, 372 pp., 1990) is edited by Karin Barnaby and Pellegrino D'Aciernio. The book is a selection of essays and discussions from a conference in 1986 jointly sponsored by Hofstra University and the C. G. Jung Foundation of New York. Karin Barnaby has taught comparative literature at Hofstra University and is now at New York University, She has published an article on Schiller and Jung and is associate editor of Quadrant. Pellegrino D'Acierno is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of Italian studies at Hofstra University. He is the author or translator of several books on comparative literature.

As part of an investigation concerned with investment by both hospitals and local authorities in mental health a number of analyses were made of various published statistics relating to costs and other operating characteristics. In the particular case of spending in mental subnormality hospitals what emerges is a pattern of such surprising variability that it was felt worthwhile presenting the information. It would appear that this particular crude analysis has not been pursued previously despite the existence of the great mass of cost statistics collected, processed, published and circulated within the Health Service. As the Service spent £39·1m. on these hospitals during the fiscal year 1968–69 one might have expected this comparative cost information to have been used in any planning process, particularly when, as will be seen, the magnitude of the variability is so considerable.

The analysis of family data in the hope of detecting a recognizable pattern in the distribution of disease may be of value in respect of cause and of prevention. The recognition of classical Mendelian ratios, for instance, is both a partial explanation and an opportunity for genetic counselling which may lead relatives to take eugenic measures. In mentally subnormal populations, however, the occurrence of disease in families often shows more complicated distributions. From knowledge of the relationship between cause and distribution models may be constructed with which empirical data may be compared, for instance, in maternal-foetal incompatibility in respect of some antigen, or in polygenically determined diseases showing threshold effects in liability to disease.

The following two commentaries were invited by the editor, and add to a series of reviews and comments that are published together with particular papers.