With this experience may be contrasted another incident, this time from our own country. Delegates from a certain Board of Guardians paid a visit to the county asylum to inspect the arrangements made for the comfort of the inmates from their own district. In the next week’s local newspaper a report of the visit appeared in the form of the chief delegate’s speech at the subsequent board meeting. This report consisted of “funny” stories of the eccentricities of the patients the visitors had seen, and of the delusions from which some of the victims were suffering, with sufficient detail to enable many of the relatives, and possibly some of the friends, of these “lunatics” to identify the afflicted ones. The newspaper account of this humorous effort was punctuated at suitable intervals with “laughter.” It is obviously not claimed that these two accounts are typical either of Germany or of England. But what is claimed is that of these two public attitudes the clinic system promotes the one, the “lunatic” asylum the other. Before leaving the comparison of insanity with tuberculosis we must remind the reader of some other facts that are important in this connection. We have seen[56] that the scientific study of tuberculosis has materially modified the earlier views concerning its hereditary transmission. It is now held that tuberculosis is not inherited as such; but that a child of tuberculous parentage may begin life with a subnormal power of resistance to the disease and perhaps greater risk of exposure to infection. If later he develops the disease, it is traceable directly to his environment. The corollary is that if his environment be improved, and his body’s power of resistance increased meanwhile by all the means in our power, he has a considerable chance of living a life free from the disease. Thus the old pessimistic view is replaced by a distinctly optimistic one. In the mental disorders that are indubitably traceable to organic disease of the central nervous system, heredity doubtless plays a great role. But two points should be remembered in this connection. First, among asylum patients the number of mental disorders which cannot, _post-mortem_, be traced to organic causes is very great as compared with those that can be so related. For example, of 1,325 patients received at the Burgholzi Central Asylum and University Psychiatric Clinic, Zürich, Dr. C. G. Jung states:—