A great many digressions into physiological questions might have been left out, and some other subjects properly belonging to general medicine, which the student could best study in some of the recent works on diseases of the nervous system, or at the clinics. As an illustration of what is meant, take, for instance, a consideration of the tendon reflex on page 576, and the short imperfect sketch on page 621, on progressive muscular atrophy, when on the next page is a figure of a man, forty-five years old, with progressive muscular atrophy, from Freidreich’s work; a case which, by the way, is probably not a case of chronic myelitis of the anterior horns, but one of the cystrophies. The subject of progressive muscular atrophies is now undergoing close study, and a large number of cases are not dependent upon lesions of the anterior horns, but are due to changes in the muscles themselves. The work of Freidreich, Erb, Lichtheim, Ladaur, Charcot, Landonzy and Dejeuni, and many others, have placed the subject in a different light from that in which it was viewed some ten years ago. Subjects like these can be found more satisfactorily treated in other works, and are altogether out of place in a book like this and only adds to its bulk. The descriptions are often such as to confuse and mislead a student; for instance, take the opening chapter on the brain, where the author says: “In man and the vertebrates, the cerebro and spinal axis may be divided into three separate portions, each perfectly independent of one another and yet very intimately connected.” Now this division is quite artificial, and is only for purposes of description, and these parts are not _perfectly independent of one another_. Again, he says: “The nervous system of all animals may be subdivided into two distinct histologic elements, nerve cells and nerve fibres.” What has become of the neuroglia and neuroglia cells; are they not important histologic elements in the nervous system of all animals? Without this supporting framework what would become of the nerve tubes and ganglion cells? And in many of the diseases of the central nervous system this neuroglia takes on a very active condition, as is seen in such a disease as disseminated cerebro and spinal sclerosis. On page 45, in speaking of the study of sections of the cortex, the author says: “By a judicious employment of gradually increasing powers in the microscopic objectives used, the general arrangement of the elements may be first mastered, and later on the minute details of each of the component parts may be studied.”