The stranger in Paris, exploring its southern suburbs along the Fontainebleau road, comes upon an ancient pile, extended and renovated by modern hands, whose simple, unpretending architecture would scarcely claim a second look. Yet it was once the scene of an experiment of such momentous consequences that it will ever possess a peculiar interest both to the philanthropist and the philosopher. It was there, in that receptacle of the insane, while the storm of the great Revolution was raging around him, that a physician, learned, ardent, and bold, but scarcely known beyond the little circle of his friends and patients, conceived and executed the idea, then no less wonderful than that of propelling a ship by steam, of striking off the chains of the maniac and opening the door of his cell. Within a few days, says the record, fifty-three persons were restored to light and comparative liberty. In that experiment at the Bicetre, whose triumphant success won the admiration even of those ferocious demagogues who had risen to power, was inaugurated the modern management of the insane, as strongly marked by kindness and confidence as the old was by severity and distrust. It was a noble work, whose benefits, reaching down to all future generations, are beyond the power of estimation; but its remote and indirect results are scarcely less important than those more immediate and visible. Here began the true study of mental disease. To the mind of Pinel, his experiment opened a track of inquiry leading to results which, like those of the famous discoveries in physical science, will never cease to be felt. A few collections of cases had been published, medical scholars, in the midst of their books, had composed elaborate treatises to show the various ways in which men might possibly become insane, but no profound, original observer of mental disease had yet appeared. Trained in that school of exact and laborious inquirers who at that period were changing the whole face of physical science, he was well prepared for the work which seemed to be reserved for him, of laying the foundations of this department of the healing art.