For similar reasons degenerate nations, after realising the doom of their national welfare, are apt to renounce the glory of a forfeited world, and to consider misery, poverty, and shame so many stepping-stones to the bliss of a better life beyond the grave. After habitual sins against the health-laws of nature have avenged themselves in cureless diseases, decrepit bigots may find solace even in that most insane tenet of their dualistic creed which teaches them to despise the body as the enemy of the soul. A natural effect of pessimism may thus, in course of time, become one of its perpetuating causes. FELIX L. OSWALD. THE NERVOUS GANGLIA OF INSECTS. I. Although the internal structure of the brain of insects has been the object of numerous and important investigations, among which we must place those of Dietl, Flögel, Bellonci, and Viallanes (who have applied the method of sections to the study of this organ), no attention has as yet been paid to the other nerve-centres of insects, and in particular to the ganglia of the ventral chain. Writers have contented themselves with describing the external form of these ganglia, and their anatomical relations to the other organic parts; but nothing has been done to throw light upon their inward structure. All the knowledge which we have on this subject is very meagre and dates far back to the works of the old writers, who, like Newport, had at their disposal no other means of study than the microscopic examination of organs viewed either transparently or in dilacerated preparations. A method so defective could render but incomplete results, and indeed in many cases erroneous ones. We have sought to supply this much to be regretted lack of entomological knowledge, by applying to the ventral ganglia of insects the admirable method of sectional cutting, which has brought about such marked advances in contemporaneous zoölogy. I need hardly insist on the interest of this research. We shall only remark that all anatomical study bears an unfinished aspect, up to the moment at which we grasp the meaning of the organs which we describe; physiology is a necessary complement of anatomy, it is that which gives to it a meaning. Therefore, when we dissect an organ, which, as in the case of an insect’s brain, is endowed with the most complex psychical properties of which these animals are capable, we find ourselves in the presence of parts whose functions almost entirely escape us. What is, for example, that peculiar organ to which we have given the name of the “pedunculate” body? Anatomists have described with the greatest care its connections and portrayed its external contour; but we cannot discover, or even conjecture its uses. It would be necessary to understand the habits of thought and the feelings of an insect, to be able to assign a rôle to parts so complex and so delicate as those contained within its brain.