will be the mental state of the world after another century of such sustenance struggle as the present? Here is evidence that the life struggle for the survival of the fittest has culminated in the idea of effort for maintenance being uppermost and paramount, until it has become an automatic mentality to the exclusion of consciousness of restraining propriety in the mind, and ideas of business and emotions of gain assert themselves regardless of the proprieties of time or place or fact.

MARY MACLANE IS NEUROPATHICALLY MORBID.— She shows too much egoism and introversion for buoyant mental health. Morbid egoism is often the beginning on the way to insanity. When"all the uses of this world"are"weary, stale, flat and unprofitable," melancholia soon attends the mind and the greater with misery of a completer mental aberration may soon come to abide it. Self introversion with moody melancholy and morbid egoism are perilous to mental integrity. Mary MacLane is apparently a little neurotic, probably troubled with a latent unrequited erotism, not having yet found its normal affinity. Congenial matrimony often cures the eroto-melancholia of ripening adolescence and places it in normal harmony with an otherwise inharmonious and discordant world.

We cannot say definitely about Mary MacLane, but we can speak positively of others with some similar symptoms. Discussing the story of Mary MacLane a city newspaper with unusual psychical discernment for a newspaper approaches a correct diagnosis when it says:

"Poor little Mary MacLane" was so absorbed in herself and her appetites that she failed to see the opportunities to earn happiness. Happiness is never found in self-absorption; that is the way of despair."

"O Mary MacLane,

You are terribly vain,

And your musings unmaidenly give us a pain,

And the ravings you come

On your beautiful "tum"

Are highly suggestive of bughouse to some."

NEURASTHENIA AND INSINCERITY is the ill-chosen caption, revealing the mistaken diagnosis of a "smart" writer in the Onlooker, who looks on with eyes strabismic, seeing crookedly and crookedly falsifying the medical and other professions.

This weak literary fellow and weaker medical diagnostician says: "The wife of one's bosom flirts with the physician, the lawyer, the very curate if he be available. She seeks their sympathy, makes complaint of her husband's incompatibility, rails at his incomprehension. The doctor, trained to an understanding of neurasthenia, shuts his eyes to his diagnosis, neglects the simple hygienic precautions necessary to a cure, pampers his patients hallucination, confirms her in her hysteria. To the lawyer her symptoms are so many forerunners to a fee. To the priest her complaints are the text for a sermon against the nonchurch-going habits of the husband, an excuse for cloaking with religion the first feeble flickerings of her infidelity."

Let the lawyers and clergy defend themselves. We fight for the doctors and denounce the ignorant, vicious slander. The dogs of medical editorial war should slip their chains of editorial dignity and pounce upon him. Hysteria and neurasthenia, which this writer confounds, are not the same thing. And the doctor who understands neurasthenia and hysteria does none of the things this writer says he does. What sort of wife and what sort of doctor has this writer that he should speak so rashly, so ignorantly and so slanderously?

DR. H. B. CARRIEL WAS ELECTED Central Insane Illi. nois Hospital Superintendent to succeed Doctor Joseph Robbins, dating from July 1. The name of Dr. Carriel is a familiar one to clinical psychiatry. He was raised in a hospital for the insane and his selection promises propitiously for a prosperous administration.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHIATRY is a timely theme well treated editorially by the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of April 10th last. This journal regards it

as a source of gratification that psychiatry is gradually taking the place in this country which it would long since have occupied had not its study, through force of circumstances, been so largely divorced from general medicine. We hope to see the day come when general practitioners, genito-urinary, naso-pharyngeal and other specialists will know enough about some grave phases of psychiatry, such as melancholia, hypochondria, etc., not to pooh-pooh them or to tell them and their friends there is nothing the matter that the patients could not themselves "cure by will power if they tried." Melancholia and hypochondriasis are as morbidly founded as an epileptic convulsion, or a sclerotic tremor.

Men who say they are not and advise against psychiatric treatment by a skilled psychiater harm both the patient and their own reputations. Apropos, Dr. Boro Sidis, discussing principles of psychology in American Journal of Insanity for January says: "A more careful study of this subject would be of great value to the general practitioner and enable him to better appreciate subconscious phenomena and psychically induced disturbances, which are as often psychically cured. To give the imagination as the cause of the whole field of functional psychoses, the phenomena of hypnosis, the manifestations of the subconscious, and also the methods of psycho-therapeutics based on these, is simply to confess ignorance of the subject. Psychology and especially that part dealing with abnormal mental action has proved useful in giving a better understanding of these phenomena."

INSPECT THE MILK.-If there were known to be as many microbes in beer as there are in milk how long would St. Louis be without a beer inspector and one who would inspect? Let all our drink be free from microbes and bacilli.

A FACETIOUS CITY PAPER SMILES at the number of new doctors graduated. It thinks they must hypnotize the people into the belief that they are ill and confirm that belief with nauseous medicines in order to get business. But there is no need of this. Our great daily city papers

create enough alarm with their quack ads and enough real patients who are victims of the conjoint collusion of the quack advertiser and the newspaper to sustain all the new doctors. The kidney crazed creatures, the failing vitality victims, the pale pill pink people, the mentally, morally and physically ruptured; despairing women; the lost manhood cranks and morbiphobious generally, developed into nervous and physical wrecks by the quack pages of the daily newspapers and finally driven to honest medicine for relief, keep the profession busy. These alarming fake medical ads, that pay their way into the pages of the city newspapers, increase the need of reputable doctors to repair the double damage by the quack advertiser and his abettor, the daily press.

If newspapers were made responsible to law as particeps criminis for the wrongs done by these fake advertisements, including the fake mines, oil wells and other get rich quick rascally schemes, fewer doctors would be needed. Shattered hopes, fortunes and bunco games helped along by the newspapers, make much business for the medical profession and unless the newspapers go out of quack and fake abetting business or some new power discovers and applies to the newspaper fraternity a moral antitoxin, doctors may be expected to increase.

DR. OPPENHEIM, Privat docent in the University of Berlin, clinic for nervous diseases, has resigned from the medical faculty. His text-book on nervous diseases has reached its third German edition and has been editorially translated into Italian, Russian and Spanish.

REMOVAL NOTICE.-The Interstate Medical Journal Co., O. F. Ball, M.D., Secretary, announce the removal of editorial and business offices to the Linmar building, Washington and Vandeventer Avenues.

SPLANCHNOPTOSIA AND ITS TREATMENT.-In a paper entitled "Floating Kidney Idolatry-A Polemic" (Medical Standard, February, 1902), Dr. Achille Rose maintains that

"the importance which at present is attributed to a floating kidney is one of those aberrations of men of science of which we find examples enough in history. *** It is an established fact that patients with gastroptosia and general splanchnoptosia have as a rule-but by no means in all cases-dyspeptic or nervous, or dyspeptic and nervous symptoms. My observations have furnished conclusive evidence that these nervous and dyspeptic symptoms may be connected directly with the displacements of the abdominal organs." According to the writer's experience, supporting the abdomen by strapping it with rubber plaster is the best method of restoring the gastric functions and relieving nervous symptoms, in these cases, and should always be tried before resorting to an operation on the kidneys. He is also convinced that we are not justified in pointing out the floating kidney as being especially the cause of gastric and nervous symptoms in cases of splanchnoptosia.-Editorial in Medical Times.

Here is another instance of finding a morbid spot and attributing all concomitant nervous disturbance to it. We have relieved many floating kidney patients by treating them with suitable neurotherapy, sometimes with and sometimes without abdominal support, and letting the kidney float, though some undoubtedly should be surgically fixed. The best support and tolerance for a floating kidney is a restoration to that health tone that existed before the floating kidney attracted attention. If that cannot be done, then cut.

A SLAUGHTERED INNOCENT AND ITS PSYCHIATRIC MORAL.-The city daily papers lately contained the following pathetic record of a precocious child pushed prematurely into its little grave by a cruel pedagogic pressure on its too receptive brain. "Marguerite Frances Schafer, the child pianist who died Monday morning after an illness of only forty-eight hours from diphtheritic scarlatina, was laid to rest Tuesday afternoon in Bellefontaine cemetery. She was 9 years old and a pupil of the Eugene Field school. She had developed remarkable attainments as a pianist for a