The improvements which succeeded were connected with each of these three points. To solar light, an artificial one has been preferred. D'Acquapendentus' bottle has given way to the convex lens, and to concave, spherical, and parabolic mirrors, etc. De Hilden's speculum has been replaced by cylindrical, conical, bivalve, and other forms of the instrument. The apparatus that we illustrate herewith offers some arrangements that are all its own as regards the process of concentrating the light. It is lighted, in fact, by a small incandescent lamp of 2 candle-power, placed within the apparatus and supplied by an accumulator. The reflector is represented by a portion of an ellipse so calculated that one of the foci corresponds to the lamp and the other to the extremity of the instrument. A commutator, B, permits of establishing or interrupting the current at will. A rheostat added to the accumulator makes it possible to graduate the light at one's leisure and cause it to pass through all the shades comprised between cherry-red and incandescence. Finally, the orifice through which the observer looks is of such dimensions that it gives passage to all the instruments necessary for treating complaints of the middle and internal ear. [Illustration: RATTEL'S OTOSCOPE.] This mode of lighting and reflection may be adapted to a Brunton otoscope, utilized for examining other natural cavities, such as the nose, pharynx, etc. Elliptical reflectors do not appear to have been employed up to the present. * * * * * STATE PROVISION FOR THE INSANE.[1] [Footnote 1: Remarks following "Definition of Insanity," published in the October number of _The Alienist and Neurologist_, and read before the Association of Charities and Corrections at St. Louis, Oct. 15, 1884.] By C. H. HUGHES, M.D. We live in an age when every uttered sentiment of charity toward the insane is applauded to its remotest echo; an age in which the chains and locks and bars and dismal dungeon cells and flagellations and manifold tortures of the less humane and less enlightened past are justly abhorrent; an age which measures its magnificent philanthropy by munificent millions, bestowed without stint upon monumental mansions for the indwelling of the most pitiable and afflicted of the children of men, safe from the pitiless storms of adverse environment without which are so harshly violent to the morbidly sensitive and unstable insane mind; an age in which he who strikes a needless shackle from human form or heart, or removes a cause of human torture, psychical or physical, is regarded as a greater moral hero than he who, by storm or strategy of war taketh a resisting fortress; an age when the Chiarugis and Pinels, the Yorks and Tukes, of not remotely past history, and the Florence Nightingales and Dorothea Dixes of our own time, are enshrined in the hearts of a philanthropic world with greater than monumental memory.