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readily accessible ; but we have only to reflect on the great extent of this country, the scattered disposition of its population, and the slowness and difficulty of communication between many parts of it, to see how much stronger are the objections to a large Asylum as a provision for all the insane of this colony. In the report made in 1873 by Dr. Paley, Inspector of Lunatic Asylums, Victoria, on the Asylums of New Zealand (to the Hon. the Colonial Secretary), he remarks that the objections to a central Asylum in New Zealand are— " Difficulty of conveying patients from distant places. 2. Removal of patients beyond reach of personal communication with their friends. Transit of insane persons of every class (whatever the kind of mental disorder under which they labour) is attended with more or less risk to themselves and those around them. In many cases their conveyance from place to place involves great danger, and when their disease is maniacal in character, and there is concomitant physical prostration, it becomes a matter of difficulty to sustain life during a long journey. When it is necessary for patients to travel by sea, all danger to their health and all difficulties to their attendants are very much enhanced ; they are often unavoidably subjected to such bodily inconvenience, if not suffering, as may even have the effect of rendering them permanently and incurably unsound in their minds. "The separation of patients from relations, friends, home, and local interest, deprives them ofa very powerful and important means of restoration to sound reason. The first approach of many insane persons to convalescence is indicated by a re-awakened anxiety about their homes and their belongings ; and nothing so much tends to help their progress towards recovery as the presence and personal sympathy of relations or friends in whom they can have confidene and trust. " On the whole, then, I am of opinion that it is advisable, in the interests of the insane, to retain tbe local Asylums in those districts which contain the greatest number of patients, reconstructing them on approved plans, and, where necessary, reorganizing them on a proper basis." The difficulty of conveying patients long distances is not now so great in many parts of the colony as when Dr. Paley made these remarks; but this is fully counterbalanced by the settlement of new and out-of-the-way parts of the country, and by the great increase of the general population; and tho lapse of time has only served to augment the objections to a central Asylum. Even as it is, the existing Asylums are so distant from many parts of the district from which they draw their population, that they are not fully available for the treatment of acute cases of insanity, and the removal to the Asylums of those patients who are strong enough to stand the journey is often a slow and expensive undertaking. I have before me a note of the removal of an insane prisoner from Roxburgh to the Dunedin Asylum. The journey was performed on horseback, and took from the 9th to the 16th of January, and cost £1 3s. 3d. Another insane prisoner was removed from Queenstown to Cromwell on the 13th March, under charge of a policeman, at a cost of £4 10s. ; thence on the 14th to Waitahuna, at a cost of £3 3s. Od.; and thence to the Asylum, apparently at no cost. Insane prisoners capable of performing journeys of three days in stage coaches, or eight days on horseback, are glaring exceptions to the general class of persons requiring to be sent to Asylums. Feeble and exhausted men, acutely excited, violent and dangerous or suicidal, and delicate women labouring under puerperal mania and hardly fit to be kept out of bed, are much better examples. It is evident that such patients cannot be removed, even to the present district Asylums, without risk and suffering; and it must frequently happen that they must either be conveyed handcuffed, or bound like criminals under charge ofa policeman, or bo removed by their friends at a very heavy cost. If it took a policeman eight days to remove a sturdy prisoner on horseback from Roxburgh to Dunedin, at a cost to the Government of £1 3s. 3d., how long would it take a man with the assistance of a nurse to remove his wife, exhausted by puerperal mania, to a central Asylum; what would be the cost of the journey, and what reasons are there for supposing that he and the family doctor would not think it more humane to let the poor creature die peaceably at home than to remove her so great a distance ? Even in England, where Asylums are numerous and near at hand, the fatal practice of detaining insane persons at home until their disease becomes confirmed prevails to a lamentable extent, and a central Asylum for a colony like New Zealand would be tho surest means of encouraging this practice. At the best it would come to bo an essential feature of this method of providing for the insane, that numerous small reception houses would have to be established in remote districts, and in these patients would be detained from day to day, subjected to restraint and seclusion, and it could hardly fail to result that many acute and curable cases, for whom Asylum treatment was of the utmost importance, would be treated under every disadvantage by country practitioners, who had paid no special attention to the subject of insanity, who had no trained attendants and no means of carrying out the proper treatment, and no time to do so even if they knew what the proper treatment was; while the central Asylum, with its costly and elaborate arrangements, would to a large extent become a mere receptacle for chronic and hopeless patients, on whom the specially qualified Medical Officers and Asylum staff would exercise their skill to little purpose. The central Asylum might be a model of good management, and even possibly of economy, but the management of the insane would be very bad and very dear. It would scarcely be worse policy to have in this colony a central Hospital for the fever-stricken, than a central Asylum for the insane. Two largo Asylums, one for each island, would be liable to almost the same objections as one for the whole colony. Statistics op Insanity. The statistics of insanity which I have been able to gather for this report are too imperfect to form a sure foundation for any conclusions of much interest. The proportion which the total number of insane in Asylums bore to the population, exclusive of Maoris, on the Ist Jauuary, was 1 to 509, whereas in 1875 the proportion of insane to population in England was 1 in 373 ; in Scotland, 1 in 427; in Ireland, lin 297 ; in New South Wales, 1 in 357 ;in Victoria, lin 322 ; in South Australia, lin 524. These comparisons are favourable to New Zealand, but they yield no accurate information; and they indicate rather that the number of insane in Asylums can he no reliable measure of tho number of insane in a country, than that there is less insanity in New Zealand than in England or in the other colonies. Even if tho real number of insane persons in the colony at any given date were