movement has even reached South Africa. "Mental Hygiene"[47] has called attention to the fact that the Cape Province Society for Mental Hygiene has actively interested itself in the provisions discussed by the government for the care, education and training of the feebleminded. Two institutions are to be opened for this purpose. The Cape Province Society has already instituted a campaign for the purpose of organizing other local societies as well as a national council. When Mr. Beers wrote his well-known book he evidently had in mind more particularly the amelioration of material conditions existing in institutions. He was looking forward to provision for the more humane and scientific care of mental diseases. This is unquestionably a consideration of vital importance and these objects have not been neglected in the practical operation of the mental hygiene organizations. Mental hygiene in its broadest sense, however, has come to mean much more than that. The foundation of the present-day conception of mental hygiene may be said to have been laid by Adolf Meyer in 1906, when he described the fundamental principles which he believed to be concerned in the development of dementia praecox. He saw in this disease a disorder of the personality due to a deterioration of mental habits, in other words, to faulty mental hygiene. While his views as to the etiology of dementia praecox have not been generally accepted, they suggested an entirely new avenue of approach to the problem of mental diseases in general. Hoch's "shut in" personality and Bleuler's "autismus" were more or less comparable hypotheses which do warrant to a certain extent the tenability of such theories as were advanced by Meyer. The same may be said of some of the mental mechanisms advocated by Freud and others of the more purely psychological school of psychiatrists. This viewpoint is reflected somewhat by White[48] in his conception of childhood as the golden period for mental hygiene. "The outstanding fact that present-day psychiatry emphasizes is that mental illness is a type of reaction of the individual to his problems of adjustment which is conditioned by two factors—the nature of those problems and the character equipment with which they are met.... Mental illnesses, defects of adjustment at the psychological level, are therefore dependent upon defects in the personality make-up, and as this personality make-up is what it is as a result of its development from infancy onward, it follows that the foundation of those defects which later issue in mental illness are to be found in the past history of that development." He protests very properly against accepting the theory that the characteristics of the personality are entirely the products of germ-plasm determiners moulded in strict accordance with the laws of heredity and therefore immutable.