After describing the condition of asylums and lunatics at that time, the author considers the constitution of the human understanding and the inequalities, weaknesses, and peculiarities of mind which do not amount to understanding, and the influence of stimuli, of age, and of disease on the mind, and then discusses the phenomena of insanity and the questions of treatment and protection. He insists on the necessity of the most scrutinising watchfulness over the servants employed in their care. In cases where patients would do themselves or others an injury he insists on watching, instead of mechanical means of restraint. He proposes a complete scheme for the care of all lunatics by the State, providing for perfect publicity of procedure. He finally points out the increasing liability of the nervous system to disorganisation owing to the increased pressure and more varied anxieties of modern life, an observation most fully justified by what has been established since his day. This work, a most readable and interesting one, both to medical men and to general readers, was not received with nearly sufficient warmth. Too many were wedded to the old systems of treatment; too many knew nothing about the diseases of the mind, and their sympathy could not be aroused in favour of lunatics. So Conolly was left to his country work at Warwick, varied by one year’s residence at Birmingham, till 1839, when he was appointed Resident Physician to the Middlesex County Asylum at Hanwell, at that time the largest in England. He had taken the opportunity of visiting the Lincoln Asylum and gaining all the advantages possible from its experience. He was now satisfied that mechanical restraint was not only unnecessary, but possibly injurious. On few others had the non-restraint system gained a hold. Hanwell had the reputation of being one of the best-managed asylums in England, many patients being occupied in agricultural and other pursuits. Yet one year after Sir William Ellis’s resignation, when Conolly took office, “instruments of mechanical restraint of one kind or other were so abundant in the wards as to amount, when collected together, to about six hundred, about half of them being handcuffs and leg-locks.” Conolly entered upon his duties on the 1st June 1839. The asylum then contained 800 patients, and he found forty under continuous mechanical restraint. In his first report to the Quarter Sessions, he informed the Justices that since the 21st of September not one patient had been under restraint. “No form of strait waistcoat, no handcuffs, no leg-locks, nor any contrivance confining the trunk, or limbs, or any of the muscles, is now in use. The coercion chairs, about forty in number, have been altogether removed from the wards.” In fact, they had been cut up to make a floor for the carpenter’s shop.