A little more than a year ago a public meeting was announced as having taken place in this metropolis for the purpose of establishing a “Benevolent Asylum for the Middle Classes.” Though many were without doubt pleased with the project of so useful an undertaking, it appears that the vast majority of the public regarded it with great indifference. For, from time to time, an advertisement in the papers—a doleful and undignified document—has complained of the want of support, begged for further aid, and reminded lately the public that the amount subscribed for the Hartley Colliery Fund over and above what was wanted, would have been more than sufficient to have started the benevolent asylum. The public indifference must be the result of public ignorance; for we well know that when the heart of the country is touched, its sympathy and help are given in a profuse and practical manner. To elicit such aid, however, there must be a reasonable and well understood end in view; and the question is, whether the promoters of this proposed asylum have given a clear idea of what they want, of what they propose to do, and of the way they propose to do it.

So much difficulty is experienced in producing the slightest alleviation of the sufferings of those affected with that form of derangement of the nervous centres which gives rise to what has been termed a hallucination, that the suggestion of any means by which this disease can be directly attacked, must be regarded as a decided advance in the treatment of this affection. Such a suggestion has recently been made by M. Baillarger, of Paris, in the recommendation of electrization.

General paresis, paresifying mental Disease, or in Latin paresis generalis, that is, paresis of mind and body, insania paresans, are terms applied to the form of mental disease generally known under the French denomination of paralysie générale.

The answer to Shakespeare's question, “What's in a name?” as conveyed in Juliet's subsequent remarks, is, at least in some points of view, unsatisfactory; for placing aside all regard to beauty or euphony of sound, there is yet much either of good or evil connected with every name that rises to our lips or is silently repeated in our minds. There is, to a sensitive being, a pleasure or a pain connected with it, in which memory, experience, and association have wrapped it round. True, the pleasure or the pain may be of infinite and almost imperceptible minuteness, but it is nevertheless an atom in our emotional existence, and is added to the sum of our mental experiences. This is the case with the words used to designate the objects which surround us, but is more obvious with those applied to places which we have visited or known, and to persons whom we have encountered, or with whom we have been familiar. But the importance and significance of a name are most clearly appreciated and understood, when viewed with reference to the articulate sound by which we ourselves are called by our fellow men. This we will find, upon reflection, to be a very important part of ourselves, to be intimately united to our “dear perfection,” and to adhere to us with wonderful tenacity, so that it is difficult to throw it aside. At the same time it is well known that a man may be legally stripped of his name, that on a sufficient payment, he may be permitted to denude himself of a beggarly appellation and to clothe himself in one of aristrocratic splendour. Yet even after this has been formally accomplished, the savour of his rags will still, we opine, hang about him. The memory of his discarded title will still, ever and anon, come back upon him like vestiges of a state of former existence, and will probably produce a mental confusion bordering upon double consciousness. Nor does it seem wonderful that a man's name should stick very closely to him and be difficult of divorce, when it is remembered how intimately it has been connected with all his conscious states from his very baptism, and how he has come to associate it almost indissolubly with the first person singular, the Ego, simple and concrete. Firmly grafted, as a man's name is upon his belief in his own personal identity, and being almost the sole expression of personal identity, as it certainly is, to many of the uneducated masses of mankind; it is not wonderful that it should be a permanent and persistent fact, difficult to be got rid of. For amongst the most fundamental principles of mind, is the conviction, out of which all names have arisen, that a man continues to be always himself; that he is at any given moment the same person that he was the moment before, and that he has always been, since he came into existence. This belief is, in fact, the very essence of mind, and arises necessarily out of the succession of momentary conscious states; just as corporeal identity springs out of a succession of material atoms endowed with certain vital functions.

In our last abstract from German and French works, we noticed the appearance of two new French journals devoted to psychological medicine, and made some general observations upon the character and purpose of each as set forth by their respective editors. We have now collected the numbers for the whole of the past year, and will attempt to cull from them what appears likely to interest our readers; and as the subject matter before us is on the present occasion to a large extent of a clinical character, our excerpta must largely partake of the same, a circumstance which we trust will not render them the less interesting.

In passing through an asylum I saw five odd and apparently aged men, seated together around a table and apart from the other patients. They smiled; spoke a few words; gabbled or jargonised. My companion said, “They like to dine together.” On complimenting him for his attention to their wishes, he answered, “Oh, they are all brothers.” On going to the department for females, I observed two quiet, elderly women, indulged in the same way. “These,” said my guide, “are sisters, and sisters of the five brothers. They were the children of poor but industrious and self-supporting parents, who were somewhat eccentric, and believed to be cousins, or related. They are all, in different degrees, imbecile, ineducable, irresponsible, and incapable of guiding or maintaining themselves. They had, besides, a brother who disappeared, and was supposed to have been drowned in a quarry; another imbecile sister still alive; and two brothers and one sister, who were healthy.”

Dr. Hood has a second time enriched our knowledge of mental disease, as it is founded upon numbers and the reflections they suggest. His present valuable contribution to the statistics of the insane is one of a series which we hope to see emanating from the officers of our large institutions, and we entirely echo Dr. Hood's earnestly expressed hope, that the Commissioners in Lunacy will recommend an uniform plan of statistical inquiry to be adopted in our county asylums, by which the present vague and unsatisfactory information contained in their reports may be compressed into form, so as eventually to become the basis of certain knowledge upon which the diagnosis and prognosis and treatment of the insane, may be conducted with some greater degree of confidence than we at present possess.