The lunatic colony of Gheel, situated twelve miles south of Turnhont, in Belgium, amid a vast uncultivated plateau consisting of heath and sand, called the Campine, affords an extraordinary example of the pre-eminent advantages of the present mode of managing lunatics. Until the era of railroads this spot was so out of the ordinary track of the world, that but few persons even of those who were interested in the treatment of the insane were aware of its existence. Here we discover, like a fly in amber, a state of things which has lasted with little change for twelve hundred years. Here we see the last remnants of the priestly treatment of insanity, coupled with a system of non-restraint which certainly existed long before the term was ever heard of in England and France. Gheel owes its origin to a miracle. Saint Dympna, the daughter of an Irish king, suffered martyrdom in this place from the hand of her father in the sixth century. So great was her fame as the patron saint of lunatics, that her shrine, erected in the church dedicated to her, speedily became the resort of pilgrims, who journeyed hither in the hope of being cured of their madness or of preventing its advent. Her elegantly-sculptured tomb contains among other bassi-relievi one in which the devil is observed issuing from the head of a female lunatic, while prayers are being offered up by some priests and nuns, and close at hand another chained maniac seems anxiously awaiting his turn to be delivered from the demon. The idea carefully inculcated by the priests, that lunacy meant nothing more than a possession by the devil, has long been banished from other lands. Here, however, it has flourished for many centuries, and the ceremony of crawling beneath the tomb has existed so long, that the hands and knees of the devotees have worn away the pavement. The act is still occasionally performed amid a scene in which superstition and terror are combined in a manner calculated to cure any lunatic, if deep mental impressions were alone required to purge away his malady. But what is far more interesting and astonishing to those accustomed to the bolts and bars, the locks, wards, and high walls of crowded European asylums, is the almost entire liberty accorded to the lunatics resident in the town of Gheel and its neighbouring hamlets, to the number of 800, or one-tenth of the whole district. No palatial building, such as we encounter in nearly every county in England, is to be seen. The little army of pauper and other patients gathered from the whole superficies of Belgium, instead of being stowed away in one gigantic establishment, in which all ideas of life are merged in the iron routine of an enormous workhouse, are distributed over five hundred different dwellings, three hundred of which are cottages, or small farmhouses, in which the more violent and poorer classes are dispersed, and the remaining two hundred are situated in the town of