In the first place I would like to thank the Association for the great honour they have seen fit to do me in appointing me their President for the ensuing year. It is indeed a great honour and a sobering experience to occupy a presidential chair which has been filled in the past by such illustrious psychiatrists as Conolly, Maudsley, Crichton-Browne, Clouston, Mercier and Mott, to mention only a few. Not least amongst these names, one day I am sure will rank that of my immediate predecessor, Dr. Drury.

Periodicity as a phenomenon in nature has been known and studied from time immemorial, Astronomy and other sciences have built up a large body of knowledge which goes a long way towards explaining periodicity in the spheres with which they concern themselves. As it appears in the animal kingdom, however, the mechanisms underlying the phenomenon are still largely unrevealed. Of late years the hypothesis has been advanced that many of the periodic happenings in the human economy are subserved by the hypothalamus. Thus menstrual periodicity is held to be due to the hypothalamus acting in conjunction with the endocrine system. This paper is a small contribution to this hypothesis, maintaining as it does that the periodicity observed in certain psychoses is due to the influence of the hypothalamus on the prefrontal cortex. So far no similar report has been made in the large literature dealing with leucotomy and it therefore seemed worth while to give our results in some detail.

This article deals with legal happenings, actual or prospective, in so far as they have a bearing on psychiatry. Both civil and criminal law are included, but no reference is made to juvenile delinquency, which is included in the article in this series contributed by Dr. Norwood East. No attempt has been made to deal with foreign literature or any changes in the law of foreign countries.

The following story was written by a woman writer while convalescing from an attack of melancholia. She had written it for publication as a short story for children.

When I read it, I was certain that it was a deliberate piece of autobiography, written in the form of a fantasy. I was therefore much surprised on putting this to the1 author to be told that it was not supposed to have any reference to herself whatever. Without any attempt at serious analysis it was not difficult to convince her of the real significance of her story, and it is such a good example of the part the subconscious plays in the writing of such stories that it seems worth recording.

The observations I wish to make in this paper are based upon some work which my colleagues at Cardiff and I have carried out, and which has a bearing on the question of prognosis in the manic-depressive psychoses.

Some explanation may seem to be necessary to account for further research into the question of sugar tolerance in psychotic subjects, as it may be thought that this line of research has been exhausted by the numerous workers in this field. A study of their work, however, shows that no critical attempt has been made to correlate the result of the sugar tolerance test with the mental and physical state of the subject at the actual time of the test. Instead, groups of patients suffering from certain psychoses have been investigated, and the results reported as percentages of abnormal curves in such psychoses. Thus, when it has been reported that a certain percentage of melancholics or schizophrenics show sustained hyperglycæmia after glucose ingestion, no attempt has been made to find out in what way these differed from the remainder in whom normal sugar tolerance was found.