The out-of-door games of the insane are very much regulated by the extent of ground attached to the asylum. Where this is ample, as at Colney Hatch, cricket is the favourite summer recreation; a skittle-alley, a bowling-green, and a fives-court, are found in most county asylums. In America, where women adopt more masculine habits than in England, female lunatics play matches on the bowling-green; and in France gymnastic exercises are employed for the exercise of both sexes, and may, we think, be introduced into the English asylums with advantage. The idiotic patients and those who are incapable of much exertion may be seen in the airing courts enjoying the monotonous swinging motion of the machine known in domestic life under the name of "the nursery yacht," being nothing more than a rocking-horse with the horse left out by particular desire. In addition to these means of diverting the minds of the patients, walking parties, under the superintendence of officers of the establishment, are made up two or three times a week. During the haymaking season it is customary to allow the inmates of asylums to which farms are attached to go forth into the fields to assist with the rake and the pitchfork. This permission is always looked upon as a great treat, and its effect upon the patients is of the happiest kind, especially _if the scene of their temporary labour admits no sight of the asylum and its wearisome walls_. Here for a few hours they seem to realize the liberty and delight of younger days. The physician on such occasions may read in their "grateful eyes" that we are at present arrived only half way on the road of non-restraint. Individual patients, again, are suffered to leave the public asylums on a day's visit to their friends, under the care of a nurse; and some who are nearly convalescent are permitted to go and return of their own accord. It is the custom of Colney Hatch and Hanwell, and we believe of most asylums in England, to grant the patients a certain period of probation among their friends, in order to test their fitness to be discharged as cured; to give them, in short, mental tickets-of-leave. This is an admirable plan, inasmuch as it secures to the patient the full enjoyment of liberty, at the same time that it enables him to keep himself well in hand, knowing that, as he is not unconditionally released, an immediate recall to the asylum would follow any sign of returning irrationality.