348 REPORTS FROM THE SECTIONS. 
preparation. Salt meat and damper are still a frequent if not the 
continuous dietary of large numbers. Fresh meat is cooked in a 
manner glaringly monotonous ; milk is untasted by a large pro- 
portion of the up-country population for months together, and 
vegetables except potatoes are an infrequent luxury for which 
numbers have to thank the itinerant Chinaman ; whilst tea, black, 
milkless, and often sugarless, is drunk at eve in 
quantities which take away appetite for the more solid and too 
often unappetising viands. 
It is no wonder that women, especially during lactation, break 
down under such a regimen, that men feel a crying, physical, or 
physiological want which drives them to bursts of hard drinking, 
or that the digestive powers fail, and with them the nourishment 
of the brain as well as other organs. 
A bountiful, a varied, and a nutritious diet is in many cases of 
service in warding off threatened attacks of insanity, or arresting 
in its early stages, and this with attention to special symptoms 
denoting bodily ailment is the main agent in the recovery in not a 
few advanced cases. ith better modes of carriage and with 
denser population we shall in time no doubt get a more varied 
dietary, and it is to be hoped that cookery will be taught as 
special and compulsory subject in the projected High Schools for 
Girls, and in the higher classes of our public schools. 
In the Gladesville table epilepsy is given as a factor to the extent 
of 5-9 per cent., but in the English table this cause is grouped, as 
it seems to me unwisely, among other bodily diseases or disorders. 
I find, however, from some statistics given by the English Com- 
missioners in 1876, that epilepsy is credited with 6°5 per cent., 80 
that probably the potency of this affection in the production of 
insanity is about the same in both countries, An intere 
shows its extreme character and potency. In 119 epilepties, pat 
several four or five each. Dr. Gowers, in his Gulstonian ares 
published in the Lancet during the current year, states _ 
out of 1,250 epileptics who came under his care at the National 
Hospital for Epilepsy and Paralysis, he found distinct hereditary 
influence in 452, or 36 per cent. Mr. Clarke’s researches 
