PRESIDENT HALL: Sex periodicity in males is very interesting. A student of mine many years ago kept his own record for some years and published it anonymously in my journal, as did another some ten years ago, and the twenty-eight day cycle seemed very marked in the first and somewhat so in the last of these papers. They are certainly interesting to the geneticist. We now often speak of dreams as protectors of sleep. I am inclined to think that a good many delusions are protectors of sanity in much the same way, and I am not at all sure that we cannot say that we shall ere long see that this is to a great extent true for the imagination. If this patient had a less vivid fancy perhaps his delusions would have been kept less fluid and his sanity would have been better protected. Is there not a relation between floridness of fancy which passes easily over to delusions (just as creative geniuses are allied to artists), but may there not be an inverse correlation between great liveliness and activity of fancy and liability to fixed delusions? At any rate, from the normal standpoint we are seeing more and more that man lives on a genetic scale. This might be illustrated by the many cases, some of them pretty well analyzed, of cat-phobias. The greatest enemies of mankind were once the felidae, and the theory now is that this type is made up of very definite elements, viz., sharp claws, stealthy tread, eyes that shine in the dark, power to leap far and suddenly, a uniquely developed voice, etc. Now the cat-phobiacs generally focus on some one of these traits in consciousness, but analysis seems to show that the rest of them reinforce the one that experience happens to thrust forward into the center of the field of consciousness. In general it seems to me that it is a great educational advantage to keep open the experiences that connect us with the past of the race, and it may have a psychotherapeutic value which we do not now dream. Years ago a New York paper investigated, with the aid of many of its reporters, and found hundreds of people fishing off the wharves of New York on Sunday, very few of whom caught any fish, and many who did threw them back. They were reverting to the old piscatorial stage, feeling again the old thrill of a nibble on the hook, and went home refreshed, even if they had not had a bite, because they had been able to drop back into an ancient stratum of the soul which was sound, so that they came back to the hard reality of the next day refreshed. Play in general, too, we now regard as reversionary, and I cannot but believe that many delusions are precisely the same.