believe that insanity is running a winning race with the healthy intellect. But these figures, if they mean anything, prove that it is not the intellect of the country that breeds insanity, but its ignorance, as it cannot be for one moment contended that the grent movements now taking place in the world originate with the labouring classes. We shall be told, we know, that there is a constant descent of patients from private asylums to the public asylums; that the professional man and the tradesman, after expending the means of his friends and family for a year or two, in the vain hope of a speedy cure, becomes necessarily in the end a pauper lunatic, and that this stream aids to swell the numbers in the county institution. Allowing its due weight to this explanation--and those who know public asylums are well aware how small, comparatively speaking, is the educated element--yet as the same disturbing element in the calculation obtained at both periods, we may safely conclude that the figures are not thereby essentially altered. A still more convincing proof that mental ruin springs rather from mental torpidity than from mental stimulation, is to be found by comparing the proportion of lunatics to the population in the rural and the manufacturing districts. Sir Andrew Halliday, who worked out this interesting problem in 1828,[20] selected as his twelve non-agricultural counties--Cornwall, Cheshire, Derby, Durham, Gloucester, Lancaster, Northumberland, Stafford, Somerset, York (West Riding), and Warwick, which contained a population at that time of 4,493,194, and a total number of 3,910 insane persons, or one to every 1,200. His twelve agricultural counties were Bedford, Berkshire, Bucks, Cambridge, Hereford, Lincoln, Norfolk, Northampton, Oxford, Rutland, Suffolk, and Wilts, the total population of which were 2,012,979, and the total number of insane persons 2,526--a proportion of 1 lunatic to every 820 sane. Another significant fact elicited was, that whilst in the manufacturing counties the idiots were considerably less than the lunatics, in the rural counties the idiots were to the lunatics as 7 to 5! Thus the Hodges of England who know nothing of the march of intellect, who are entirely guiltless of speculations of any kind, contribute far more inmates to the public lunatic asylums than the toil-worn artisans of Manchester or Liverpool, who live in the great eye of the world, and keep step with the march of civilization, even if they do but bring up its rear. Isolation is a greater cause of mental ruin than aggregation--our English fields can afford _crétins_ as plentifully as the upland valleys of the mountain range, seldom visited by the foot of the traveller; whilst, on the other hand, in the workshop and the public assembly, "As iron weareth iron, so man sharpeneth the face of his friend."