When we read that only some fifty years before the times of Columbus Christian Europe had no lunatic asylum,--not that there was a lack of lunatics or that the existence of lunacy was entirely ignored, but that the then state of medicine and the general intelligence was not emancipated from the idea of demoniacs,--and we are told that the lunatics were in many instances hung, quartered and burned, hooted and chased about the streets, or chained in gloomy dungeons; until, as related by Lecky, a Spanish monk named Juan Gilaberto Joffe, filled with compassion at the sight of the maniacs who were hooted by crowds through the streets of Valencia, founded an asylum in that city. His movement in this direction called the attention of the Church and people to this class in a practical light, and from Spain a more enlightened idea in regard to this class swept onward throughout Europe. As observed, it seems strange to us of the present day that such ignorance in these matters should, or could, have so long existed. It seems impossible for us to conceive how these conditions of incoherent action and of mental derangements could have existed and their causes have not been fully appreciated; and yet we were not above, some twenty years ago only, subjecting children to punishment and scoldings for being addicted to nocturnal enuresis, or of accusing cases of nocturnal and involuntary emissions as being due to masturbation. The child was allowed then to grow up paralytic, or with a deformed limb, or continually punished to correct what was imagined to be a condition of willful carelessness, irritability, or willful moral perversion. Perversion, stupidity, and irritability of the mind or temper were not known to depend, in many instances, on preputial irritation; children were, accordingly, worried and punished for something over which they had no earthly control or the least volition. Humanity cannot, at present, sufficiently appreciate what Louis A. Sayre has done in its behalf. It is here that we realize the hidden wisdom of the Mosaic law and the truth of the assertion of the late Dr. Edward Clarke, that, "The instructors, the houses and schools of our country's daughters, would profit by reading the old Levitical law. The race has not yet outgrown the physiology of Moses."