In the daily routine of medical work we are called upon to deliver what may come to pass. The constant weighing and measuring of our observations and experience lead us naturally to an estimation of probabilities. Recovery or death—success or failure in the appointed strife with disease—that is the momen tous question to which the physician must endeavour to find an answer. Things have happened; what is to come to pass? Much of skill in prognosis is personal, empirical, and incommunicable; but, as our science advances, with the contributory aid of all the sciences that are subordinate to the master art of healing, so, in just proportion, our premonitions will be determined.

In the “children's Crusade” we witness the enormous credulity of the Dark Ages in its simplest form, although the delusions which the children indulged in must have been encouraged by their parents. The orders of the King of France to stop their pilgrimage had evidently been disregarded. Was it that a whole people had become mad? Some writers have argued that nobody is quite sane; in that case we should need another word for those who cannot do without restraint.

Recidivism is the French coined term most appropriate to express the persistent, reiterated lapses of the same individual, in that small section of habituais found in every country, both among criminals engaged in serious crimes against the person and property, and among petty offenders, whose delinquencies or misdemeanours are drunkenness, public disorder, prostitution, and vagrancy. The former are aggressive, noxious, anti-social, and, to a slight extent, industrious and productive; the latter, as a rule, are passive, idle, debauched, parasitic, and unproductive. The two types are quite distinct, and there is little or no inter mingling; that is to say, the recidivist engaging in the major crimes in the criminal calendar does not forsake the ranks of that class to become a recruit in the ranks of the minor and petty offender class, and vice-versâ.

In a previous paper we described the lesions in the posterior columns of the spinal cord in cases of general paralysis, and pointed out their similarity with those in early tabes dorsalis. We showed that the degeneration always commenced at the point where the posterior roots enter the cord. It is here that the sensory fibres become part of the central nervous system and lose their neurilemma sheath; and in all cases we found that precisely at this point degeneration began.