unknown in this country. The term lunatic, which first appeared in the English statutes in 1320, during the reign of Edward the Second, was still in quite general use. The only state hospital for mental diseases was the one at Williamsburg, Virginia. Such institutions were universally known as asylums for many years. Insanity was generally discussed in the terminology of Pinel and Esquirol as including mania, melancholia, dementia and idiocy. Those not thoroughly familiar with the psychiatry of the past may not understand the sense in which the word dementia was employed. It was defined by Esquirol in the following terms: "There exists, therefore, a form of mental alienation which is very distinct—in which the disorder of the ideas, affections and determinations is characterized by feebleness and by the abolition, more or less marked, of all the sensitive, intellectual, and voluntary faculties. This is dementia." It was looked upon usually as a terminal state following excitements or depressions and in some rare instances as being primary in origin. There have been many important developments in psychiatry since the days of Benjamin Rush. The mania, melancholia and dementia of the eighteenth century have apparently gone for all time. The events of the last hundred years include more particularly the delimitation and complete differentiation of general paresis, the rise and fall of the paranoia concept, the description of the traumatic psychoses, the establishment of the alcoholic insanities as clinical entities, a study of the mental diseases due to endogenous and exogenous toxins, the recognition of the neuroses and psychoneuroses in their modern sense, the addition of the psychopathic personalities to our classification and the definition of manic-depressive insanity, dementia praecox and involutional melancholia. The mental states due to somatic conditions have been exhaustively studied and the psychoses associated with epilepsy and pellagra have been fully investigated. Psychology and psychiatry have been definitely correlated and pathological research placed upon a firm foundation. The psychiatric phraseology of today would have been practically meaningless to the students of Pinel. Curiously enough the word psychiatry, which goes back to nearly 1800 in the literature of Germany and Italy has only been used for a few years in this country and England. The word psychosis is of even more recent origin.