"These cottages are much preferred to the wards by the patients themselves, and permission to reside in them is much coveted." In these few lines we read the condemnation of huge structures like Colney Hatch, built externally on the model of a palace, and internally on that of a workhouse, in which the poor lunatic but rarely finds any object of human interest, where his free-will is reduced to the level of that of a convict, and the very air of heaven necessary to his health is doled out at intervals, when, with infinite lockings and unlockings, the attendants order a batch of persons into the stagnant and tiresome airing courts. Infinitely better for the lunatics would be the freedom and homeliness of the smallest cottage to the formal monotony of cheerless wards; better far that they should, as Dr. Bucknill suggests, cook and wash for themselves, than that the offices should be performed wholesale in the steam-laundry and the steam-kitchen. A patient would undoubtedly feel a far greater interest in peeling his own potatoes for the pot, and in cooking his own bit of bacon, than in receiving them ready cooked. It is the duty of the physician to interest the patient in his daily work, and no more effectual method of accomplishing this could be suggested than in putting him to work for himself. Wherever large asylums are already erected, no better plan could perhaps be suggested than the building of satellite cottages, which would form a kind of supplementary Gheel to the central establishment; but we should like to see the experiment tried, in some new district, of reproducing in its integrity the Belgian system. The colony of Gheel was once a desert like the country which surrounds it; it is now, through the happy application of pauper lunatic labour, one of the most productive districts of the Low Countries. Have we no unoccupied Dartmoors on which we could erect cottages, and train the cottagers to receive the insane as members of the family? The performance of domestic offices, the society of the goodwife and goodman, and the influence of the children, would do far more to restore the disordered brain of the lunatic--pauper or otherwise--than all the organization of the asylum, with its daily routine, proceeding with the inexorable monotonous motion of a machine, and treating its inmates rather as senseless atoms than as sentient beings, capable, though mad, of taking an interest in things around them, and especially awake to the pleasure of being dealt with as individuals rather than as undistinguishable parts of a crowd. The children are of particular moment. Lunatics are singularly gentle to them, and are interested in all their actions. At Gheel it is customary to send the bairns into the fields to conduct the patients home from their labour in the evening; and we learn from Dr. Webster that a violent madman, who would not stir upon the command of his host, will suffer himself to be led, without a murmur, by