H.—2a,

4

insanity is hopeless, without first of all reversing, as far as possible, its casual conditions, making drugs and restraint merely exceptional aids. The treatment, as being developed in the most scientific hands both in Europe and America, is steadily tending in this direction. No form of mechanical restraint, seclusion, or confinement, even in airing courts, will, I venture to say, be much longer practised where it can possibly be avoided ; and the use of drugs will be increasingly restricted where a known diseased process, acute in character, has been actually recognized. Comfortable rooms and clothes, a good diet, and plenty of out-door exercise, especially in the form of carefully regulated employment, are the truly scientific means of combating mental disease. One of the most marked characteristics of chronic lunatics is a strong aversion to regular industry. Their natural tendency is to indulge aimless mooning and morbid dwelling on depressing thoughts, so seductive even to the sane, when they are not mentally robust. Let any grief or overwhelming calamity overtake a healthy vigorous man, and he instinctively betakes himself to some engrossing pursuit—to labour, the anodyne of Nature's own providing. lam convinced that here we have the main indication of all rational treatment of the insane. We must combat by all means in our power this tendency to idleness, this aversion to do anything save what chimes in with their disordered fancies. I believe that the success of our Asylum is largely due, among other things, to the extent to which Dr. Hulme and Mr. Hume have availed themselves of regular employment as a means of cure. Nothing is more mischievous, next to actual restraint, than that lunatics, strong and id the prime of life, should be allowed to stroll all day in pleasure-grounds, indulging in aimless brooding and morbid fancies. Mere walking exercise, be it ever so regularly taken, has comparatively little effect in checking this evil. In the case of women the matter is still worse ; and this I take to be the greatest defect in our mode of treating them. All except the few who can be regularly employed in washing, scrubbing, and cooking, are usually employed in sewing, one of the most automatic of all employments, and which therefore leaves the mind free to roam. May not much that is characteristic of women generally be traced to the fact that sewing and other kindred avocations are so admirably calculated to leave the wandering fancy free ? Dr. Hulme has very forcibly called attention to the disproportionate increase in the number of our lunatics, due to the inferior character of our recent immigrants. Formerly we reaped all the benefits .of the fact that advancing communities attract the more energetic and pushing members of retrograde communities and employments, while the weak and the lunatic are left behind, where they propagate and raise the average of pauperism, lunacy, and crime. There is every reason to fear that our recent policy has with lamentable rapidity greatly altered if not entirely reversed this state of things; the heaviest part of our immigration expenditure has yet to become apparent. We shall do well to look to our schools, our hospitals, and our asylums. Not merely may we expect our lunatics and criminals to multiply at an unprecedented rate, but even our types of lunacy will change. Instead of acquired and therefore largely-curable insanity, the result of a selected, active, and enterprising people, we may expect numbers of idiots and imbeciles, the outcome of long-continued poverty, ignorance, and a low degree of development. I have, &c, D. MacGbegob, His Honor the Superintendent, Otago. Inspector. By Authority: Geobqb Didsbuby, Government Printer, Wellington.—lß7s.