The field of variable star research has become so broad and the amount of research to be reported on has grown so rapidly that it is a vain hope that a report of this kind, in a very limited space, could cover the whole field of research and could mention all the papers that have been published in the last three years. It is only hoped that this report presents the significant results achieved in the field of the most important aspects of variable star research. Some important subjects (e.g. cataclysmic variables) relevant to the variable star research are reviewed in the reports of other commissions. This is a consequence of the fact that the research has become very complex and the phenomena producing light variability belong to the field of interest of other commissions, too.

By the death of Dr. Henry Rayner our Association has lost one of its oldest and most esteemed members, who had done great service to it and to the cause of the insane.

In view of the impending meetings of the Fourth International Congress on the Care of the Insane, to be held in Berlin from October 3rd to 7th, 1910, it seems desirable that the members of the Medico-Psychological Association and other readers of the Journal of Mental Science should be able to have in print a record to the present date of the proceedings of the International Committee, which was originally appointed at the Congress held at Milan in 1906 with the object of studying the causes and prophylaxis of mental disease.

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.

The object of this paper is to state briefly what appears to the writer to be the law as to voluntary boarders in asylums (under which term is included all English institutions for the reception of persons of unsound mind), to narrate the practice observed in such cases at Bethlem Hospital, and to gain information from those members of the Association who are engaged in the treatment of mental disease as to their practice.

I feel greatly honoured by being allowed to open a discussion on the working of this Act; but as Bethlem admits more private cases in the year than any other institution in the kingdom, and as the chief alterations in the law concern the admission of private patients, it is perhaps appropriate that the discussion should be opened by someone resident at Bethlem. I feel I cannot do this better than by bringing before your notice facts which have occurred, and if in doing this I weary you, it will be merely a small reflection of the weariness we have experienced in the last six months from this new law.

Hypnotism has been found by some of its students, especially on the Continent, to have so many possibilities in its connection with medicine, and so much undoubted influence in connection with the mind, that it has naturally fallen to its lot to be employed for trial, at any rate, in the therapeutics of some of the mental maladies. The dominance of one human being over another, which is, for the moment at least, gained by its influence, seems in some ways more appropriate to the guidance and help of the insane by the sane, than of the sane by their equals. But its possibilities and uses are not questions that can be determined by any à priori reasoning as to whether such guidance may be for the advantage of those who are led in certain circumstances of difficulty, such as insanity, but rather by the facts and results of its application.

C. M. F., æt. 40, wife of an artist; had one child, aged six years. Admitted into Bethlem Hospital March 31st, 1887.