"The next point which has struck me in my experience, both in respect to others and myself, whether as regards cases placed under our care, or cases in regard to which were asked to give our opinion in consultation, is the mode in which we all very soon come to look at any new case. We do not ask ourselves, nor do we seek to determine by the questions we put to the patient or his friends, what the nosological name of his particular form of Insanity is. What we are solicitous to know is the “natural history” of the disease before us, and its cause. Is it a Congenital disease? It is one associated with Epilepsy caused by masturbation, by paturation, or protracted lactation, or some other debilitating cause, or by hard drinking? Is it a case of orgnaic Brain disease, or General Paralysis? Is it one connected with Phthisis-with the critical period, or with the atheromatous vessels of the brain of the Senile Dement? Such are the kind of questions we seek to solve, in order to form a diagnosis of the nature of the case, and in order to enable us to answer the anxious inquiries of friend as to its probable termination ; and such instinctively and practically are the data upon which we classify the cases, which are placed under our case, in our own minds. Why, then, should we adopt another ground of classification in our tables and text-books? And why should we perpetuate a nomenclature so indefinite and conventional, and which has no other foundation upon which to rest than an imperfect, of not an obsolete, system of psychology? Were our physiology of the Brain as perfect as that of the Lungs-were we able to predicate what particular portion of the Brain was affected in each case of Insanity-I cannot see how our present mode of classifying the varieties of the disease (according to the character of the mental symptoms) would ever be one of practical utility. We do not classify the various disease in which delirium is present by the character of the mental affection l we do not describe acute or violent delirium, or muttering delirium, or fugacious and wandering delirium, or coma, as “diseases” ; we describe the diseases upon which they depend, of some of which we know as little as we do of Insanity, but of which we know at least the natural history,- the origin, course, and probable termination ; and we describe, accordingly, inflammatory fewer, typhus and typhoid fevers, phthisis, uraemic poisoning, and the other diseases of which these different forms of delirium are only symptoms. Why should we proeed upon another principle in regard to Insanity? Why should we attempt to group and classify the varieties of Insanity by the “mental” symptoms, and not, as we do in other disease, by the “bodily disease” of which those mental perversions are but the signs?"