The same results can be obtained with less degenerate subjects. Success occurs often when patients are enabled to understand the nature of their sufferings, to discern that their disease does not belong to insanity, that it is unlikely to lead to mental disease. This understanding is one of the best of all anodynes. Donders, of Utrecht, said to one of his patients suffering from optic hyperæsthesia of neurasthenic origin: "What medicine cannot do, time and oftentime hygiene realise." The intelligent patient having thus received assurance of his sight, good hygiene and mental rest soon after produced a cure. Acquired mental depreciation may exist from the first years of the child's life. These depreciations in proportion to their intensity are characterised by fatigue and even nervous exhaustion accompanied with physical weakness and functional trouble in one or more organs of sense, by pathological debility of the intelligence and impaired memory especially for recent facts, difficulty of comprehension and of associating ideas and judgment, as well as worries, fears, despairs, especially in cases of intoxications by morphine, cocaine, bromides, coffee, &c. These are increased by irritability and excitability when the troubles arise from onanism, puberty, or other periods of transformation in the sexual life. Fight from the first the symptoms of predisposing and occasional causes, because if aggravation be prevented recovery is possible. Especially in these depreciations must the physician utilise all his knowledge and prove that only mental science is sufficient to cure such patients. Not only has he to guide the intellectual life, and life of sensibility and will, but he has also to remedy the morbid physical conditions, to superintend the general régime, times of work and rest, air, light, dressing, preservation from alcoholic and other excesses. One great element of possible danger of the first importance is training in the sexual sphere. To avoid and at the same time to enlighten is the problem presented. In dealing with this problem the great requirement, balance, not repression, must be kept in mind. Masturbation is very frequently an expression not of mental or moral deficiency, but of purely local (first in at least most cases) physical conditions. Irritation (from the presence of worms in the rectum or vagina, an intensely acid state of the urine, or constipation) to male foreskin and female clitoris has produced a local itching, the attempt to relieve which has led to masturbation. Granting all that has been said about the deteriorating effects, especially in degenerates, the source should first be sought here. Attention to these physical states will often prevent the development of this practice and its resultant moral deterioration.