The cerebral anatomist, if destitute of any leading idea as to what he should be searching for, must be labouring under considerable disadvantage when he examines the intimate structure of the brain; and since the study of his choice must, from its peculiar intricacy, demand his best attention, he cannot be expected to be as profound in his pyschology as he is in his anatomy. “It is interesting to remark,” says Wagner, “that wherever an insight into the nature of the functions performed by an organ has been wanting, there has the structure also remained more or less obscure; we feel the want of everything like a guiding principle in the anatomical inquiry; of this truth we have satisfactory assurance in the cases of the thyroid, thymus, and supra-renal bodies and spleen.”* Then, as regards the pyschologist proper, if he devotes his days and nights to the analysis of the mind's conscious and expressed operations, it is not in human nature that he should be a professed and original anatomist as well. Indeed, division of labour is more necessary, perhaps, in this obscure field of research than in any other. Now, it is as a pyschologist who, in the interest of truth, has deemed it his duty to explain mental phenomena in such a way as to be in harmony with the ascertained structure of the brain, that the writer offers the following remarks, hoping that they may not be unserviceable to the cerebral anatomist.

Having in my last paper noticed the different forms in which loss or lesion of the Faculty of Articulate Language is met with by the clinical observer, I now propose to consider the various causes which give rise to this morbid symptom.

First Argument of the Committee.—On the mistake of those who think that the persistence of the reasoning power, the knowledge of good and evil, and of right and wrong in the insane, involves their responsibility for their criminal acts.

It has appeared to me highly desirable, if not requisite, that there should be some extension of the present system for the admission of boarders into establishments for the insane, and that the anomalous and confusing condition of the existing laws referring to them, by which each division of our country has its enactments at variance with the others, should be amended in such a manner that all parts of Great Britain and Ireland should be subject to one scheme of legislation on the subject.

In July 1745 Swedenborg returned to Sweden, and soon afterwards resigned his assessorship, so that he might be at liberty to devote himself to the new function to which he imagined that he had been especially called. Accordingly, all scientific studies and pursuits he now abandoned entirely; all worldly honours and interests he counted worthless; he devoted himself to that sacred office “to which the Lord Himself has called me, who was graciously pleased to manifest Himself to me, His unworthy servant, in a personal appearance in the year 1743; to open in me a sight of the spiritual world, and to enable me to converse with spirits and angels. … Hence it has been permitted me to hear and see things in another life which are astonishing, and which have never come to the knowledge of any man, nor entered into his imagination. I have been there instructed concerning different kinds of spirits, and the state of souls after death—concerning Hell, or the lamentable state of the unfaithful—concerning Heaven, or the most happy state of the faithful, and particularly concerning the doctrine of faith, which is acknowledged throughout Heaven.” He is well aware that many persons will affirm that such intercourse is impossible, and that it must be mere fancy and illusion on his part, but for all this he cares not, seeing that “he has seen, heard, and had sensible experience” of what he declares.

Although from an early period of medical enquiry syphilis has been known to affect, more or less seriously, the whole system, it is only within the last decade that attempts have been made, chiefly by foreign pathologists, to demonstrate that this fatal virus does not confine its ravages to the coarser structures of the human body; but that the delicate tissue of the nervous system may be alike destroyed, and the mind's balance unhinged, by its direful effects. MM. le Dr. Leon Gros et E. Lancereaux in a work, Des Affections Nerveuses Syphilitiques, published in Paris, in 1861, have with great care collected a mass of observations from different quarters, but have not added much to our knowledge in defining the symptoms which accrue from syphilitic disease of the brain and its membranes. Indeed the confusion and uncertainty which prevail in this path of pathology are so great, and the subject itself is of such paramount importance, that any cases at all authenticated bearing on this point ought surely to be recorded.