The conclusion of my letter may be taken up with the discussion of a treatise that deserves a somewhat more detailed consideration. The director of the Royal Würtembergian State Insane Asylum at Zwiefalten, Dr. F. L. A. Koch, who already possesses eminent repute in the domain of psychiatry, has just published the first part of a new work called _Die psychopathischen Minderwertigkeiten—Erste; Abteilung: Einleitung, Die angeborenen andauernden psychopathischen Minderwertigkeiten_, Ravensburg, 1891, Verlag von Otto Maier. In this work the author extends the development of the ideas he some time previously outlined in his _Rudiments of Psychiatry_, second edition, 1889. In the expression “psychopathische Minderwertigkeiten” (psychopathical secondary factors) Koch embraces all those psychical irregularities, be they natural or acquired, affecting the life of the human personality, which though in the severest cases even not amounting to actual mental disorders, yet in the most favorable instances so affect the persons afflicted with them that they appear as lacking the full possession of mental normality and capacity. Primarily, of course, the treatise is intended for physicians, and the author counts on the gratitude of this profession in so far as he has undertaken to put in independent form the separate facts formerly scattered over the whole domain of psychiatry, to free them from other neuro- and psycho-pathological subjects, and to unite them into one special group of pathological states. But the author also counts on his book being used by the representatives of other professions, by pastors, tutors, teachers, jurists, sociologists, historians, and the like, and indeed with perfect justice.