propensities which may be merely unreasonable or may be dangerous to themselves and to others. It seems that the idiotic and feeble-minded are devoid of, or defective in, general mental receptivity, although in regard to a few things they may have retentive but unintelligent memory. Even the less afflicted among them are incapable of “thinking” at all, because their defective memory or receptivity gives them nothing to think about. On the other hand, the lunatic exhibits the ordinary receptivity of a healthy human being, but thinks wrongly or absurdly upon one or a few lines, though normally and soundly upon every other. The State in civilised countries has long since made provision for the proper medical care and restraint of lunatics and of the extreme cases of the other class, the idiots. But by an oversight in this country, which the gravedigger in _Hamlet_ would consider very natural, the less extreme cases of idiocy—the so-called feeble-minded—have been left without State guardianship. It is a fact that these cases occur both in the wealthiest and the poorest class of the community, though they are put away under medical care by well-to-do families, and are left by the very poor to wander about and get into terrible mischief. Hence there has grown up a belief that feeble-minded offspring are more frequently produced by mentally sound parents who are very poor than by those who are rich or well-to-do, though there are not facts or figures which establish that conclusion. It has further been maintained that this supposed large proportional rate of production of feeble-minded among the poorest, ill-fed, ill-housed, and vicious dregs of the community is due to the action of defective nutrition, alcoholism, and lack of fresh air and healthy occupation upon the parents, and that a deterioration of the reproductive material, a twist, as it were, of the inner substance of the stock or breed in the direction of feeble-mindedness, has been thus established.