Scientific Serials

Abstract

THE Journal of Mental Science, July,—We have heard or read of a rather impressionable gentleman who, as he perused Dr. Buchan's “Domestic Medicine,” fancied himself afflicted with every disorder therein described, not even excepting the pains of pregnancy. Bearing this in mind, we would recommend that none save those well assured of their own sanity should read the Journal of Mental Science. There is so much about morbid psychology, madness, and idiocy, that weak readers are in some real danger of being taken possession of by an uncomfortable suspicion that they may be a little touched themselves. The place of honour is given to an address on idiocy by Dr. J. C. Bucknill. This is a piece of special pleading (justified, perhaps, by its occasion) for the education of idiots. Now, as these miserable abortions must be kept in life because of the indirect evil effects of any system of extinguishing them, we certainly desire that they should be kept in asylums and made comfortable. But we cannot even grant that they are “more worthy of our efforts than those races of animals which men strive to bring to perfection.” Except in so far as Science may be advanced by such work, it seems very much of a waste of time for such a man as Séguin to labour for four months to fix the eye of an idiot as the first step in the education of sight. We cannot go into ecstacy on hearng that idiots are actually taught to use knives and forks, when so many rational beings around us have neither knives nor forks to use, nor any use for them. By all means let the charitable support asylums for idiots; but at the same time it should not be forgotten that these poor creatures can never be educated into anything useful or lovely, and that a point is soon reached beyond which further education is misspent labour.—A valuable paper on “The Use of Digitalis in Maniacal Excitement” is contributed by Dr. W. J. Mickle. Next follows, under the title of “onsciousness and Unconscious Cerebration,” a rather muddled attempt, on the part of W. G. Davies, B.D., to upset Dr. Carpenter's doctrine of “unconscious cerebration.” From this article one might suppose that the views combated were peculiar to Dr. Carpener and his so-called disciples Dr. Bastian and Miss Cobbe, whereas its truth the writer has against him not these only, but also the most distinguished of living psychologists. His writing is a good deal in the bad old style, the language serving at times, as it seems to us, to obscure rather than express thought. Dr. Carpenter is accused of imagining a nervous anatomy to suit his theory. But Mr. Davies does not himself seem to be up with the latest scientific surmises. For example, in laying the groundwork of one of his own arguments, he says: “The very same cells in the visual sense-centre cannot, at one and the same moment, see brown and yellow.” He does not seem to be aware that it is highly probable that the cells that see one colour never do see another. There are over a dozen other papers, all of more or less, some of them of considerable interest.