that apprehends with a very wise writer that "despite the misery in the universe, the joy is there and immensely preponderant." "Who," asks Emerson, "shall set a limit to the influence of a human being" here? He who convinces the psychic sufferer of that joy is worthy of the poet's benison:

God bless the heart of sunshine
That smiles the clouds away,
And sets a star of fresh-born hope
In some one's sky each day.
God bless all words of kindness
That lift the heart from gloom,

And in life's barren places

Plant flowers of love to bloom.
A. H. G.

SUGGESTION IN THE TREATMENT OF UNBALANCE, DEMENTIA PRÆCOX, AND INCIPIENT INSANITY

A person who has unmovable delusions is necessarily insane. E. G. YOUNGER, M.D.,

Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain.

All the developmental insanities are the result of some biologic sin somewhere in the ancestry. The sin may have been committed in innocence and ignorance, but nevertheless it was sin. Wherever biologic immorality predominates, wherever the fundamental natural laws are continuously broken, no matter how pure and good the intention of the lawbreakers may be, degeneracy will prevail, if not in that generation, then in the next and thereafter.

Professor CHARLES W. BURR, M.D.,
University of Pennsylvania.

Psychical therapy is a necessary coefficient of hygienic discipline, rendering its precepts imperative. In some instances this therapy clears the mind of dominant ideas better than travel and occupational diversions. The psycho-therapist can, through hypnotic suggestion, successfully command hunger, sleep at a definite time, courage, good temper, a desire to work, and a strengthening of general sensibility.

Professor EUGENIO TANZI,
Royal Institute of Florence.

Good or bad to one extreme betrays the unbalanced mind.
ALEXANDER POPE.

VI

SUGGESTION IN THE TREATMENT OF UNBALANCE, DEMENTIA PRÆCOX, AND INCIPIENT INSANITY

ELUSIONS like those described in the fore

their origin and disappear with the general nervous conditions in response to treatment in which the psychic is intelligently blended with the physical. But there are delusions that have struck their roots more deeply into the soil of belief and betoken impending mental breakdown unless promptly disbosomed. This raises the question whether in threatening insanity the power of suggestion can be used to advantage. Can it be made a contributor of value in the treatment of dementia præcox or other forms of insanity in their initial stage? In the author's experience, timely suggestion has proved an invaluable adjutant in many cases whose terminal would otherwise have been the madhouse.

Insanity implies an impairment of one or more of the mental faculties manifested in language or