short distance to the left of the Great Western Railway, and about seven miles from London, is one of the most remarkable establishments in the country; and though it is somewhat out of our limits, we cannot pass it by without a brief general notice *. The asylum is intended for one thousand inmates, and accommodation will probably be eventually provided for thirteen hundred. The present number of servants and officers exceeds one hundred. The grounds contain fifty-three acres, twenty of which are cultivated as a farm, four as a garden, two as an orchard, and nearly four are shrubberies. The airing-grounds and courts occupy a space of eighteen acres, and the asylum buildings cover above three and a half acres. The ancient bodily restraints, on which entire reliance was formerly placed, have been disused, and even severity of tone has almost ceased to be employed. We can here only say of the system, that it is in every respect precisely opposite to that which, until within a comparatively short period, was acted upon at Bethlem.

The new Lunatic Asylum for the county of Surrey has been erected in Garratt Lane, Wandsworth, in the Tudor style, and is a handsome building, but is said to be not unexceptionable in its architectural arrangements. Some of the faults at Hanwell have been repeated here, such as making the patients' sleeping rooms face each other, and lighting the galleries from above, by which the ventilation is rendered very imperfect. The same system of treatment has been adopted as is practised at Hanwell.

There is considerable diversity in the internal regulations of different public asylums as to the power and position of the medical and non-medical officers. In some there is a resident physician, who holds the supreme authority, and is also steward and general manager; in others the physician only presides in his own department; and in others the chief officer is not medical, and the physician is non-resident.

In all asylums the position of the matron is one which requires to be settled in some uniform manner: owing to the matron having been in many cases the wife of the superintendent, an undue importance has been given to her position; the appointment of the female attendants, and even the classification of the female patients, has sometimes been left in her hands. In the French asylums there is no matron: a few of the most experienced female attendants act as heads of departments, and receive the orders of the medical officers; and this arrangement, which is found to work exceedingly well at the Salpétrière, where there are 1500 female patients, seems on the whole to be the best. The effect of placing the matron in a higher position is almost certain to bring about interference on her part with the duties of the medical officers, which cannot fail to be injurious to the welfare of the patients.

In the appointment of a chaplain, steward, secretary, accountant, and any other officers, the most important point is to confine their duties within certain proper limits, and to prevent their interference with the patients without the concurrence of the medical officers.

There should be in each asylum one resident medical officer, responsible for the entire conduct of the asylum. At Glasgow the whole authority has for some years been in the hands of the resident physician, with the most satisfactory results; and an approximaton is made to this plan in the Irish district asylums, where the nonresident physician is the principal officer.

* We take the opportunity (as we have not space for details) to recommend to all who are interested in the subject the admirable Reports of Dr. Conolly, the physician at Hanwell, and also the Reports of the Visiting Justices, by whom his enlightened efforts have been supported in a most excellent spirit.

By the acts lately passed, the power which the justices who had the control of different asylums possessed, of passing rules at any meeting which entirely changed the system of management, or of summarily dismissing any officer, is done away with.

A great improvement has been made of late years in the class of persons appointed as attendants, or, according to the old phraseology, keepers. The proportion of attendants to patients in the different English asylums varies, from one to ten to one to twenty. No ward, however small, should have less than two attendants, in order that it should never be left; this is enforced by the rules of several asylums. A large number of attendants renders a vigilant superintendence by night practicable, which is no less important than by day, although it is entirely omitted in some institutions. Every part of the treatment of the insane has of late years been much modified by the introduction of a much milder mode of management. The total abolition of personal coercion, known as the non-restraint system, was first introduced at the Lincoln Asylum in 1837, and its complete success there led to its adoption at Hanwell in 1839, and shortly afterwards at Northampton, Gloucester, Lancaster, Stafford, and Glasgow. This system has since been adopted at Haslar Hospital, and also at Armagh, Londonderry, and Maryborough; and very little restraint is used at the other Irish district asylums. The asylums which do not agree to the disuse of restraint as a principle have effected it in practice, with very few exceptions. Since the year 1792, when Pinel struck off the chains of the patients at the Bicêtre, a gradual improvement has been going on in the treatment of these the most unfortunate of human beings; but the declaration, that mechanical restraints were never necessary, never justifiable, and always injurious,' made by Mr. Hill of Lincoln, has caused this march of improvement to proceed much more rapidly. The reports of the asylums in which the new system has been introduced, especially those of Hanwell, give all particulars as to the mode of management substituted for coercion.

However opinions may differ as to the abolition of restraint in those asylums which have not tried the experiment, many thousand patients have been treated entirely without it; in no asylum where the new system has been introduced has it been found necessary to abandon it; the reports of all these asylums state their general condition to be improved; the cures have not decreased; and, which we consider of equal importance, the comfort of the incurables is much increased: and we may therefore be justified in considering that within a few years the instruments of restraint now remaining in use will disappear like those much more severe ones which preceded them.

XVI, LEARNED SOCIETIES.

COLLEGE OF SURGEONS.

THE practice of surgery in England, during the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, was almost entirely in the hands of the clerical profession, and by them the barbers were employed to assist in the baths, to apply ointments, to bleed, and in various other surgical operations. When, in 1163, the clergy were prohibited from undertaking any operation involving bloodshed, the art fell still more into the hands of the barbers. In the reign of Edward IV., Thomas Morestede, who had been surgeon to Henry IV., Henry V., and Henry VI., succeeded in obtaining a charter by which the Company of Barbers, practising surgery in London, were incorporated in the names of St. Cosmo and St. Damianus, brethren, physicians, and martyrs; and then, or shortly afterwards, they established their hall in Monkwell Street. The surgeons soon endeavoured to separate themselves from their associates, and they formed themselves into an independent body, called the Surgeons of London. By an Act, 3 Henry VIII., surgeons and physicians were obliged to have a licence to practise from the bishop of London or the dean of St. Paul's; but in the 14th and 15th Hen. VIII. cap. 8, another Act was passed in favour of men and women who understood the "nature of herbs, roots, and waters," who, it was enacted, were not to be interfered with; and as the disunion of the barber-surgeons' and the surgeons' companies appears to have been found inconvenient or mischievous after all, so, during the same reign, they were re-united by the Act 32 Henry VIII., under the name of masters or governors of the mystery and commonalty of barbers and surgeons of London, and were to enjoy all the privileges previously belonging to the single company. This was in 1541. It was at this time that Henry VIII. presented them with their charter, which forms the subject of an excellent painting by Holbein, still adorning the old hall in Monkwell Street. In 1745, however, the union was finally dissolved; and in the following reign, by the Act 40 Geo. III., the surgeons were still further advanced by being incorporated into a Royal College, as they remain to this day. On leaving Monkwell Street they built, by subscription, a new hall for themselves, which stood partly on the site of the most southern of the buildings now constituting the Central Criminal Court, and partly on the site of the adjoining dwelling-houses. Some noticeable recollections attach to this place. Through a door in the basement, in the centre of the building, the bodies of murderers, executed at Newgate adjoining, were carried for dissection, according to the Act of 1752, and which has not been very long repealed. In the early part of the present century the College removed to the present building in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

The Square of Lincoln's Inn Fields, with its gardens, its fine old mansions, and its historical recollections, is a place pleasant to walk through, and suggestive of interesting and elevated thoughts. Here, for instance, perished Babington, and his youthful and accomplished companions, who, in their sympathy for the captive Queen of Scotland, put aside their own allegiance to Elizabeth, and endeavoured to dethrone, if not slay her, in favour of Mary,-whose own fate they thus precipitated. Here, too, was Lord William Russell led to the scaffold; the last of those distinguished men, who, during the eventful period comprised between the commencements of the reigns