"There may possibly be certain drawbacks to the truthfulness of this picture-shadows which partially obscure the distinctness of its outlines, but the general consequences which flow from the invigorated understanding, are not substantially affected by them.

"We must not expect to find in the majority of these classes, a cultivated taste, a delicate susceptibility of the elegances and nice proprieties of life-an easy and graceful demeanour-the transition which leads to these, springs out of transmitted and not acquired riches. The struggle and the labour by which these are obtained, leave little leisure, and are seldom accompanied with the disposition to study refinements regarded as trifles, but which are fraught with a peculiar charm and interest. They are the last touches which education gives to the feelings. The mental energies are stimulated by more important considerations, and they are kept in vigorous play by the circumstances which call them into existence."

Dr. Calvert Holland is an original thinker. Everything that proceeds from his pen is entitled to our most patient and respectful consideration. He is disposed to think favourably of mesmerism, and the facts he brings forward illustrative of the view he has taken of this vexata questio, certainly are startling, and deserve careful investigation. We confess that we have seen enough to convince our own minds that there is some truth in Mesmeric phenomena; but, in saying this, we consider it necessary to protest against its betng supposed that we are Mesmerists in the fullest acceptation of the term. Disbelieving and doubting much of the phenomena attributed to this influence, we would respect those who conscientiously pursue these abstruse inquiries. Lord Bacon says of the ancient alchemists, that although they did not succeed in discovering the philosopher's stone, their apparently profitless speculations were productive of much good; they dug up and pulverized the soil, and thus made it more adapted to the purposes of vegetation. May this not be said of Mesmerism?

ART. V. (1.) A Remonstrance with the Lord Chief Baron, touching the case Nottidge v. Ridley. By JOHN CONOLLY, M.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Physician to the Middlesex Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell, &c. London: Churchill, 1849. 8vo. (second edition.)

(2.) A Letter to the Lord Chancellor on the Defect of the Law regulating the Custody of Lunatics. By CHARLES CURTON COOPER, one of Her Majesty's Counsel. London: Stevens and Morton, 1849. 8vo, pp. 15.

(3.) Copy of a Letter to the Lord Chancellor, from the Commissioners in Lunacy, with reference to their Duties and Practice, under the Act 8 and 9 Vict., c. 100. Ordered to be printed by the House of Commons, on the motion of Lord Ashley, M.P., and Chairman of the Commissioners in Lunacy. 8vo, pp. 12.

IN the gradual progress of knowledge and the extension of humanity, IDEAS Sway to and fro with as much regularity as the movements of the pendulum. It is the great business of discussion to prevent these oscillations from becoming too violent or discursive. This observation is specially applicable to the advancement of the medical and legal management of insanity. Even at the advent of the Christian era, insane persons were held by the apostles themselves, to be "possessed of devils;" and from that time until towards the end of the last century, these unhappy creatures continued to be regarded as objects of punishment and persecution, rather than of sympathy and kindness. It would be difficult to imagine in the widest stretch of fancy, the miserable sufferings of these outcasts of society, during so many hundreds of years, whilst violence and coercion were considered to be the bounden duty of those who had the regulation of the insane. This, indeed, offers a chapter of horrors in the history of the human race, from the scrutiny of which the mind recoils with a sense of remorse and degradation. The treatment so long mistakenly pursued, developed insanity to such a fearful intensity, as we humanely hope may never in these or future times be witnessed again. The insanity of the present day, often sufficiently fearful, is mild in comparison with the malady of former days, when the chain and the gyve, the blow and the cell, were well nigh the sole medicines and ministers for the insane; when it was common enough for keepers to murder lunatics by their violence, and for madmen to turn upon their tyrants and destroy them with their own manacles. In this country, men are now living who can remember the time

when, in many of our villages, the only place of restraint for the furious maniac was the stocks, or the pen for impounding stray cattle. The unfortunate lunatic was held to be something between the criminal and the beast of the field. If we look to the causes of this cruelty towards the insane, we shall find them rather in the imperfect constitution of society and in the Cimmerian darkness which so long prevailed respecting the real nature of insanity, than in any wanton cruelty on the part of the cultivators of medicine. Moreover, insanity was late in becoming strictly a medical subject. Even at the present time there exists a set of philanthropic fanatics, who claim the insane for religion, rather than for medicine, and it must be admitted that, during the worst epoch of their management, or rather mismanagement, they were the liege subjects of theology instead of the art of healing. Our own profession was not sufficiently advanced to claim its right in the teeth of ignorance and superstition, even so lately as the close of the reign of George III., of insane memory,—for it is well known that that unfortunate sovereign was more under the care of a quack divine than the regular physicians. We should wonder now to see any patient of royal blood consigned to the care of a Rev. Dr., and his cold water beds, but the parallel events actually happened only three reigns ago.

But the last decade of the eighteenth century saw the dawn of a brighter day for the insane. Even in that time of great thoughts, engines of the mind which have since shaken the world, it was a bold conception of PHILIP PINEL, who struck the fetters from some of the most violent maniacs at the Bicêtre, and proclaimed to the world that henceforth the strict enforcement of gentleness should be the great coercionary method in the management of the insane; that assuasive kindness should take the place of the bolt and the scourge-that lunatics should be received into the human family as objects of the profoundest sympathy and attention. Yes! one act of a benevolent genius established for future generations that the insane were to be treated as patients and not as prisoners. What must have been the sensations of that illustrious man after releasing some of the very strongest and fiercest maniacs from the chains which had bound them for years to the wall, men whom others were afraid to trust with liberty for a moment, lest they should rend their keepers! Pinel found that, instead of the spring of the tiger, they greeted him with tears of gratitude, and were passive and obedient as children to his commands. Pinel's was a noble experiment, performed at the risk of his own life. Humanity can never offer a sublimer spectacle than that of a good man standing between insanity and cruelty!

Since the time of Pinel, the humane idea generated in his mind has gathered strength in all civilized countries, and it has, when carried to its utmost length, produced even some excesses. Whilst we deal tenderly with these excesses, on account of their origin, it is nevertheless our duty to point them out for remedy and correction. No man really conversant with the matter, can gainsay the fact, that in this country, as in others, medical men have been the foremost ameliorators of the condition of the insane. As the management and study of insanity have improved, asylums for the insane have passed from lay into medical hands, so that at the present time the treatment of insanity is almost purely in the hands of the profession. In truth, medicine receives it as an admitted truth, that PSYCHOLOGY is the very highest department of medical study, and some of the greatest minds we possess have been devoted to this most important subject. For the results, we can point triumphantly to the splendid works on insanity and other matters relating to the insane, which have been produced within the last half century-to the diminished mortality among the insane, and to the vastly-increased proportion of cures which have been effected. Yet it is a humiliating fact, that in the over-excitement of the public mind on this topic, there is evidently manifested a prevailing jealousy of the profession in all that concerns the insane. In the trials of criminals suspected of insanity, or persons undoubtedly insane, in considering the crimes committed during paroxysms of insanity; in commissions of lunacy; and in every other instance in which medicine comes before the public in connexion with insanity, this jealousy is most flagrantly apparent. The profession is treated as though it deserved punishment rather than gratitude, for its exertions in behalf of the insane. Every opportunity of blame, deserved or undeserved, is eagerly seized upon by the organs of public opinion. A society actually exists, "The Alleged Lunatic's Friend Society," holding public meetings, publishing transactions, offering premiums for anti-medical essays, the great-nay, sole object of the association being, to destroy what its members imagine to be, the existing medical despotism towards the insane. Doubtless, there are, in the profession, as in all large bodies of men, unworthy individuals, and some of these occasionally commit faults in the management of the insane, for which reprehension and punishment are due. From none do they receive them more emphatically than from their professional brethren. But such cases are too few and rare to justify the public jealousy and suspicion. No; we must attribute the major part of the public illiberality towards the profession to an excess of the

benevolent sentiments for those afflicted with insanity-principally fostered and carried into execution by medical men themselves. Mixed with this, there is a natural sensitiveness on the question of the liberty of the subject, an invasion of which, by medical men, is held in great professed horror. The public mind has been so harrowed and saturated by tales of asylum atrocities, of Bedlam and St. Luke's in the olden time, that men cannot think of these places even now, save as dens of lust and barbarity. No layman who has not visited a well-conducted asylum, where kindness is the invari able rule; where restraint, or rather, control, is invisible; where the appearance, and not the appearance merely, of family association predominates; where an inexperienced person would scarcely distinguish the lunatics from their attendants, can fairly judge of the case as it at present stands between the medical profession and insanity. Yet every one thinks himself constituted a judge upon this matter, every one dreams of an insane person not as he is, gardening, reading the newspaper, playing at billiards or cricket, in the gymnasium, or taking unlimited exercise; but they imagine him after the pattern of Sterne's prisoner, making the dreary notch in his stick which told of a day of misery, by the one dreary ray of light allowed to penetrate his dungeon. The public mind seems drunk, if we may so express it, with humanity upon this matter. Such is the extent of this, perhaps pardonable, but certainly mischievous sensitiveness, that it cannot be tolerated even that the insane should submit to that kindly control quite compatible with non-restraint, and which is necessary to defend themselves and others from injury, and, above all, necessary to the cure of insanity. It is a disagreeable necessity that medical men should have to curb these excesses of humanity, but it is a necessity, and one to which they must submit, taking care at the same time that the real interests of the insane do not suffer. That the profession will do their duty, the public has a warranty in the past conduct of those medical men who are engaged in the treatment and elucidation of insanity. We are led to these preliminary remarks by the recent case of "Nottidge versus Ripley," in which the prevailing and injurious jealousy of the public towards the profession, has been rendered very prominent both by the dicta of the learned judge upon that occasion, and by the pretty unanimous comments of the public press. If this feeling were allowed to dominate unreproved, the humanity-mongers would soon degrade the treatment of insanity into a branch of quackery, for none would be held fit to treat the insane but those willing to bow to the prejudices of ignorance and jealousy. For ourselves, we think that our