(_b_) The question of the tendency of a family, during two or more generations, to severe neuroses of more or less varying kinds, including neuralgia, is difficult to work out perfectly, though in a large number of instances we may get enough information to be very useful. I have spent much time and trouble in endeavoring to collect such information; but there are two main difficulties in connection with all such attempts. From hospital patients you frequently can get no reliable information whatever respecting any members of the family farther back than the immediate parents; and, even respecting uncles and aunts and first cousins, it is often impossible to learn any thing. And when you get to a higher class of society, especially when you approach the highest, although the information may exist, it may be withheld, or you may be purposely mystified. One would doubt beforehand, under these circumstances of difficulty, whether it would be possible to obtain affirmative evidence of the neurotic temperament of the families of neuralgic patients in general; but, in truth, the evidence is so overwhelming in amount, that more than enough can be obtained for our purpose. I shall give, first, the results of one special inquiry which, by the kindness of a patient, I have been able to carry out with more than usual completeness; it relates to the medical genealogy of a sufferer from sciatica; the account is fairly complete for four generations. The great-grandfather was a man of splendid physique (an only son), who lived very freely, but died an old man. His children were three sons, one of whom (though strictly temperate) was a man of eccentric and somewhat violent temper, and suffered from a spasmodic facial affection. This one, the grandfather of my patient, married a lady who died of phthisis, and among the ten children she bore him, two sons died of phthisis, two sons became chronically insane, one son died, probably of mesenteric tubercular disease (aged fifty-six), two sons are still alive at very advanced ages, and have always been perfectly healthy and strong; one daughter died in middle age, it is not certain from what cause; one daughter lived healthily to the age of eighty, and then was attacked by facial erysipelas, followed by violent and intractable epileptiform tic, which clung to her for the remaining four years of her life; and the remaining daughter, an occasional sufferer from migraine, died at the age of sixty-seven, almost accidentally, from exhausting summer diarrhoea. The fourth generation, in this branch of the family, consisted of thirty-one individuals; of whom seven have died of phthisis, or scrofulous disease; one from accidental violence, one from rheumatic fever, one from scarlet fever; and among the surviving twenty-two one has been insane, but recovered; two are decided neuralgics; one is occasionally migraineuse, and once had a smart attack of facial erysipelas, corneitis, and iritis, as the climax to a severe