It has long ago been questioned by psychiatrists whether these so-called delusional ideas of this class of patients deserve to be endowed with the value of delusions. Let us not forget that a similar attitude toward officialdom exists in the minds of criminals enjoying a respite from the law. It is the officers of the law, society's institution for the prevention and punishment of crime, that these people have to fear, and when they speak of being persecuted by those who have their care and safe-keeping in hand, it is not, necessarily, a pathological manifestation. The only difference between such paranoid ideas in the criminal at freedom and the one in confinement is that in the latter case, coupled with the stress of confinement, the stress of a forced routine existence, these ideas assume enormous proportions and in some instances become supported by fallacious sense perceptions. Their exaggerated self-consciousness, their great tendency to introspection, a tendency which is very much enhanced by confinement and plenty of leisure time for such indulgence, and their paranoid attitude toward law and its officers, makes it possible for them to endow the least significant occurrence in their environment with a personal note of prejudice. The least deviation from the normal routine has a meaning to them, a meaning which is readily interpreted as some evidence of persecution, of prejudice, etc. The course of their disorder shows so much evidence of this psychogenetic character that it is impossible to think that we are dealing with a psychosis which apparently has no relation to the situation at hand. Every symptom which they manifest can be traced to some definite cause and can be clearly explained as being of the nature of a reaction, of a motivated expression to a definite experience. It is, I believe, unnecessary to enter into a lengthy discussion to show that we are not dealing here with a case of dementia præcox, but with one of the degenerative psychoses and we will consider the criminal tendencies of this individual likewise as expressions of that same degenerative soil which permitted of the development of the psychosis. On July 17, 1911, the patient was returned to the penitentiary to serve out the remainder of his sentence. CASE III.--P. F., alias H., white male, aged 42. Admitted to the Government Hospital for the Insane, March 11, 1910. Father is a chronic alcoholic; one brother a wanderer, has not been heard from for twenty years; one sister a suicide; one sister left home at the age of eighteen and has not been heard from since.