A further inspection of this grouping of mental diseases shows not only that it contains many conditions not usually termed “insanity” (such as, e.g., feeblemindedness, epilepsy, alcoholism, sundry somatic diseases, psychoneuroses), but that these conditions are presented for practical purposes in a certain seemingly arbitrary order. Without attempting to justify this selection of scope (not too wide for modern psychiatry, most would readily acknowledge), I shall draw out a little further what I consider to be the virtues of the order selected. In the first place, all will concede, _some_ order of consideration of collected data is a prime necessity to the tyro. Without an order of consideration the diagnostic tyro is but too apt to find in the best textbooks of psychiatry (even more easily the better the textbook) all he needs to prove that the case in hand is--almost anything he selects to make his case conform to! And how much more dangerous this debating-society method of diagnosis (by choice of a side and matching a textbook type) may become in the fluid and elastic conditions of psychopathic hospital practice, can readily be observed by one who contemplates the _formes frustes_ and entity-sketches that the “incipient, acute, and curable” group of cases presents. CHART 1 PRACTICAL GROUPING OF MENTAL DISEASES The order adopted for these groups (which roughly correspond to botanical or zoological orders) is a pragmatic order for successive exclusion on the basis of available tests, criteria, or information: the actual diagnosis is a product of still further differentiation within the several groups. The case-histories of this book will show that (_a_) most shell-shock is in group X, Psychoneuroses, (_b_) the diagnostic delimitation problem is chiefly against I. Syphilopsychoses, III. Epileptoses, VI. Somatopsychoses, (_c_) the finer differentiation problem is between X. Psychoneuroses and V. Encephalopsychoses. (See Epicrisis, propositions 9-12, 40-43, 72-73.) I. Syphilitic Psychoses SYPHILOPSYCHOSES II. Feeblemindedness HYPOPHRENOSES III. Epilepsy EPILEPTOSES IV. Alcoholic, Drug, and Poison Psychoses PHARMACOPSYCHOSES V. Focal Brain Lesion Psychoses ENCEPHALOPSYCHOSES VI. Symptomatic (Somatic) Psychoses SOMATOPSYCHOSES VII. Presenile-Senile Psychoses GERIOPSYCHOSES VIII. Dementia Praecox and Allied Psychoses SCHIZOPHRENOSES IX. Manic-Depressive and Allied Psychoses CYCLOTHYMOSES X. Psychoneuroses PSYCHONEUROSES XI. Other Forms of Psychopathia PSYCHOPATHOSES