Insanity is a disease of the most highly differentiated parts of the nervous system, in which the psychical functions, as thought, feeling, and volition, are seriously impaired, revealing itself in a series of mental phenomena. Institutions for the insane were at first founded for public relief, and not to benefit the insane; but this idea has changed in the past, and there is a growing feeling that a natural and domestic abode, adapted to the varying severity of the different degrees of insanity, should be the place for the insane, with some reference to their wants and necessities, and that many patients (not all) could be better treated in a domestic or segregate asylum than in the prison-like structures that so often exist, and that the asylum should be as much house-like and home-like in character as the nature of the insanity would permit; while exercise and feeding are accounted as among the best remedies in some cases of insanity, particularly in acute mania. The new disease called morbus Thomsenii, of which I wrote in my report last year, has been carefully studied by several men of eminence, and the following conclusions have been reached as to its pathology: The weight of the evidence seems to prove that it is of a neuropathic rather than a myopathic nature, and that it depends on an exaggerated activity of the nervous apparatus which produces muscular tone, and that it has much analogy to the muscular phenomena of hysterical hypnosis, the genesis of which is precisely explained by a functional hyperactivity of the nervous centers of muscular activity. Until quite recently it was supposed that the rhythmical action of the heart was entirely due to the periodical and orderly discharge of motor nerve force in the nerve ganglia which are scattered through the organ; but recent physiological observations, more especially the brilliant researches of Graskell, seem to show that the influence of the cardiac ganglia is not indispensable, and that the muscular fiber itself, in some of the lower animals, at all events possesses the power of rhythmical contraction. Several valuable additions to our knowledge of the anatomy of the nervous system have been made by Huschke, Exner, Fuchs, and Tuczek.