In taking up the office of President of the Association, I wish first of all to convey my thanks to the members for having appointed me to this honourable position, which is at the same time so full of onerous duties, and to assure them that during my tenure of it no effort will be wanting on my part to maintain the honour and interests of the Association. The first onerous duty which is put upon the shoulders of the President is that of giving a presidential address, a duty which I can assure those who have not yet passed the chair involves no small amount of anxious thought and work throughout the year of probation allowed to the President before taking up his office.

Although the psychology of hallucination does not enter largely into the literature of this country, it may be gathered from the writings of our English psychologists that most of them recognise in hallucinations, illusions, percepts, and ideas a family resemblance; but the points of dissimilarity among these processes have not, in my opinion, received their due measure of consideration. I propose, therefore, to describe the ordinary psychology of these processes, drawing especial attention to their points of dissimilarity; and I will endeavour to show that, while their resemblance is mainly psychological, their difference is mainly physiological.

At the Annual Meeting of this Association held at Liverpool two years ago I had the pleasure of giving an account of the work which I was then doing, on the medullated nerve-fibres of the cortex cerebri, and I endeavoured to demonstrate that a comprehensive study of the form and arrangement of these constituents in the normal adult condition afforded a useful guide to precise localisation of function.

I have thought that at the present time, when there is a prospect of systematic school provision being made for epileptic children in accordance with recent legislation, the attention of this Association might usefully be called to the necessities of the case.

The criticism that, at the Annual Meeting, I applied to Tables IV and VI, was purely destructive, and while it was, as I think, efficacious, it is open to the retort that the criticised tables must stand, unless I can suggest something better. The object of this present communication is to suggest tables which shall not be open to the objections which I have urged against those proposed by the Statistical Committee.

Dr. R. S. Stewart's statement, in his paper on “Wages, Lunacy, and Crime,” that he used the term “stress” in the ordinary sense of the term did not escape my attention, and naturally led me to suppose, until I read the subsequent part of his paper, that he meant to use the term in the sense in which it was introduced into psychiatry; and it was his departure from this “ordinary” sense which led me to make my expostulation. I desire to deprecate any notion in the mind of Dr. Stewart, or of anyone else, that I am pursuing this subject from any motive except that of clarifying our terminology from ambiguity and uncertainty. For one of my books I have chosen, as a motto, Huxley's confession: “The whole of my life has been spent in trying to give my proper attention to things, and to be accurate, and I have not succeeded as well as I could wish”; and it is in the continued pursuit of these objects that I venture to resume the subject. No alienist of candid mind will deny that our branch of medical knowledge and art still lags behind other branches; and, while much of this retardation is due to the greater inherent difficulty of the subject, and to other causes, some of it is unquestionably due to looseness of terminology and to that inaccuracy of thought which is indicated by inaccuracy of expression. It is the appreciation of this lack of precision which has prompted me to suggest the abandonment of the terms “mania” and “melancholia,” which no rigour of definition can ever now restrict within useful bounds; and with the same motive I return to the topic of “stress” as a text for the exhortation, not of Dr. Stewart alone, but of all of us, to consider with care what meaning the terms we use will convey to our hearers and readers.