If these suggestions of mine, which I did not propose to offer, savour rather of the destructive, to use my correspondent's phrase, it is because destruction is the only reform possible; and to patch up the old system is like mending worn-out garments with older cloth. When reform, utter and complete, has been devised and carried out, insanity may be 'eliminated'--I quote the same writer again--more than he thinks; for a blessing may fall on men's efforts which seems very justly denied to them now. As long as this form of false imprisonment is possible, as long as scores of sane men and women are being maddened in private asylums, and hundreds of mad people being driven madder, insanity in England will not decrease. As for its proper medical treatment, I have nothing to do with it and nothing to say to it. I take up my correspondent's address at his desire, in the hope of learning something, and this sentence is among the first to catch my eye: 'Voisin says that in simple insanity he finds certain alterations in the gray matter of the cerebrum, consisting of minute apoplexies, effusions of hæmatin and hæmatosin into the lymphatic sheaths, infarctions, atheroma, capillary dilatations, and necrosis of vessels, and certain changes of cerebral cells.' Quite so. It may be all very true; but I can offer no suggestions as to medical treatment based upon these remarkable assumptions. When, shortly before my final removal, I was allowed to see a relation of mine at a town at some distance off, the principal objected to the permission being too often given, because conversation carried off too much white matter from the brain. I distinctly assert that he said 'white,' because, by connotation of the statement with Voisin's valuable remarks, it will appear that the 'gray' remained in my case unaffected. That neither hæmatin nor hæmatosin has been effused into my sheaths, that my capillaries remain undilated, and that I am proudly conscious of having escaped both atheroma and infarctions, I must ask my readers to accept my word. What abominable nonsense is all this! And how soon may such nonsense degenerate into evil. In another part of the same pamphlet I find the writer presently citing this Voisin's recommendation of the 'strait waistcoat' on the ground that the patients like it! There, I think, it is as well to lay the treatise down.