nurses.

a skilled physician in constant attendance, and the tenderest of And then we want the superintendent to take this poor, bruised, battered creature, who was a misfit from the start and reorganize him-call back again the forces that were filtered away in the years when he was trying to cope with an unpitying world, that proved, in the language of poor little Joe, "too many for him." And if the superintendent doesn't do it, we say he doesn't understand his business. If we don't know anything about it (and probably we don't), and we think other people don't know anything about it (and probably they don't) we say that if he were in England, and in a hospital, the doctors would make him over, and the government would make them do it.

Is this a good, fair, honest, genuine, work-a-day interest which, through the medium of the press, the public so unanimously agree to hold for the insane? Or is it the factitious state superinduced by novel reading and that love for the "horrible and awful," which is inherent in our nature, and to which the astute newsboy directs his talent in advertising his wares? The evidence, alas! is all in favor of the latter supposition. The Philadelphia press is justly tamed for the extent and variety of plans which it has promulgated for the better protection and comfort of the insane in state hospitals. Its members are cordially agreed that they should have books, papers, etc. But do they do anything toward supplying them with these comforts? Not much. Arthur's Magazine is sent gratuitously to the Harrisburg hospital, and is, by strict interpretation, the only one of the Philadelphia publications, whether of periodicals, newspapers or religious papers, that is sent by the publishers, free of charge, to any of the State hospitals for insane in Pennsylvania; yet the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin is sent to the Western Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane; though not a state institution, yet, from its general characteristics, it comes within the spirit of the letter, and the Bulletin should be credited.

Is it the insane, or is it the hospitals,-clothed in that air of mysticism and romance and tragedy in which they have been invested by sensational writers that really interest the public? A few weeks ago we read of an almshouse in Dutchess County, New York, in the insane department of which sixty inmates are living in a state of wretchedness in a building two stories high, thirtysix feet long and twenty-four feet wide. The description dropped,

still born, from the press. It was not interesting. The same week an editor in New York felt worried because he thought [he was, by the way, mistaken] the hospitals did not possess "such necessary instruments as opthalmoscopes, æsthesiometers, dynamometers, sphygmographs, microscopes, Faradic and galvanic electric batteries, etc." The news spread like wild fire. There was a

general agreement that that was a dilemma.

There are, in Pennsylvania, four thousand nine hundred and fifty-three insane persons. Of this number one thousand eight hundred and ninety-two are in hospitals, and two thousand four hundred and ninety-three in almshouses. Of the smaller number

that are in hospitals, volumes are annually written; of the larger number that are in almshouses, the Secretary of the Board of Public Charities annually writes a few terse paragraphs. In the insane department of Blockley one thousand and four persons are living in a building that has proper accommodations for but seven hundred and sixty-six. They are officially reported in the Report of the Board of Fublic Charities for 1878 to be "in a state of semistarvation," and that one-fifth of them are without shoes. Bye and bye, when they get into the hospital at Norristown they will become fit subjects for editorial pens; but in their present plebeian surroundings their case does not furnish the kind of literature the world wants.

My friend picks up Dr. Van de Warker's article on Government Supervision for the Insane. "Did you read it?" I ask. "I read all except that about the almshouses."

"That about the almshouses was the nearest approach to the truth that the article presented; for that was once true, though, happily, its worst features have passed away. The confidence of the public in the hospitals has been weakened by the indiscriminate abuse which they have received from the malicious and the uninformed. Meantime the insane are ground "between the upper and the nether millstone." The public will not support the efforts of the really philanthropic, who seek to provide hospital accomodations for all the insane, because one party says hospitals are a failure, and the other party says hospitals must be equipped in a style of luxury which cannot be afforded by the average tax-payer. If state hospitals are furnished more luxuriously than circumstances properly warrant, it is that the superintendents have sometimes

yielded to pressure from without. The public has demanded extravagant appointments. There are seventy-one state hospitals in the country. The superintendent is often the treasurer. Thousands of dollars are annually passing through his hands. Does anybody ever hear of a superintendent absconding with the public funds? No. They have been assailed from all possible points. They are always surrounded by the captious and disaffected, both among the sane and the insane. Their public and private life is subjected to the closest scrutiny by the people who know that the prejudiced public is waiting for a new sensation. Spare a moment to candor and truth, and compute how much of all that is charged en masse has ever been proven against the individual.

From the figures which have been presented, taken both from American and English statisticians, we find that the percentages of cures in both countries range from twenty to twenty-five per cent. on all persons attacked by insanity. It has been said that "to reform the drunkard one must begin with his grandfather." The paradoxical truth contained in that remark aptly applies to the cure of insanity-that is, prevention. "Science has furnished no prevention, and the measures which are best calculated to act as such, are those which characterize a life governed by prudence, moderation, a good judgment and sound common sense.'

E. M. LAWNEY.

PRIVATE LETTERS OF WILSON, ORD AND
BONAPARTE.

[EDITED BY DR. ELLIOTT COUES, U. S. A.]

HROUGH the kindness of Professor S. S. Haldeman, I am put

THR

in possession of certain letters received by him from Miss Malvina Lawson, daughter of the famous engraver who executed the plates of Wilson's and Bonaparte's "American Ornithology." As will be seen from this lady's letter, Prof. Haldeman is placed at liberty to make any use of them he may please, and he makes over the same privilege to the present writer. Accompanying the papers is a finely-executed drawing of the school house in which

Wilson taught, made by M. S. Weaver, in 1841. It is believed to be more satisfactory and reliable than any one of the several hitherto published.

The letters speak so fully for themselves, that little is left for the editor to say. They are all three addressed to Mr. Alexander Lawson, whose connection with the great works of Wilson and Bonaparte made him only less eminent than the authors themselves, and to whose extraordinary ability as an animal engraver so much of the fame of these works is to be attributed. They are strictly private letters, written without a thought of publication; but they contain nothing that may not properly appear in print. Each of them speaks of matters relating to the inside history of the books, then in preparation, which were destined to achieve immortality; and they have on this account some permanent historical value. Especially is this the case with Wilson's letter; otherwise, however, the correspondence is chiefly interesting as the "gossip of the great."

Wilson's fame seems to have derived a fresh lustre of late from the appearance of Grosart's work and the re-issue of two of the leading editions of his " Ornithology" (Ord's and Jardine's). Every scrap of his unpublished writings has acquired additional value in the eager search of late made for manuscripts of his, or any other record which may serve a biographer's purposes. The letter herewith presented has long been in print, in substance; it is in fact one of those best known, having been used by George Ord in preparing his Life of Wilson, about 1825, and therefore being already a historical document. But I find, on comparing it with Ord's print, that it has never been published correctly, or in full. In editing the letter, Mr. Ord abridged it in several places; suppressed the names of several persons mentioned, for obvious reasons of expediency which do not hold now; paid no attention whatever to the punctuation and capitalization, and “dressed up” Wilson's careless phraseology throughout. This is an editor's proper business, under ordinary circumstances; but it becomes an unpardonable sin in the case of a historical document, such as Wilson's famous Pittsburg letter has become. It is therefore highly desirable to publish this letter verbatim, literatim et punctuatim, thus for the first time transferring it correctly from manuscript to print. (The compositor should carefully "follow copy"—if it

goes out of the window, the editor can correct the proofs from the original).

To those who may have no acquaintance with Wilson's life and writings, a word about this letter may be acceptable. With the first two volumes of the "American Ornithology" (published in 1808 and in January, 1810) under his arm, the "melancholy poetnaturalist" had set out on an extensive tour to canvass the country for subscribers, and hunt for new birds. It was one of the turningpoints in his career, and curiously repeated the time when the Paisley weaver, as he tells us in his autobiographical fragment, set out as an itinerant pedlar in Scotland, to travel in the interest of 'pack and poems." The letter describes his journey to Pittsburg, his impressions there, and his preparations for a boat voyage alone down the Ohio. It is one of the most characteristic of all those which Ord and Grosart have given us; the man himself pervades it, not the ornithologist; and I think its flavor is better retained in the shape in which it is here given, than it has been under editorial polishing. Wilson was all his life oppressed with poverty; he successively figured in the roles of weaver, pedlar, poet, pedagogue, orator, artist and naturalist; he was a tall, thin, hooked-nosed, black-haired person, given to despondency and flute-playing, very irritable and of uncertain moods, of insatiable ambition, intolerant of criticism, rather illiterate, and with very moderate talent for anything; emerging from obscurity by an indomitable perseverance that fairly beat bad luck out of the field, the "smoking flax" of his mysterious genius at length burst into flame that made his life luminous. His actual attainments in Ornithology were slender; the point is not so much what he did, as that he did much of anything under the circumstances. The man was greater than the ornithologist.

I append a few explanatory notes which seem not misplaced. The letters of Ord and Bonaparte require no other comment. George Ord completed Wilson's work in 1814, in nine quarto volumes, only seven of which Wilson lived to see completed, having died August 23d, 1813, aged forty-seven. Charles Lucian Bonaparte, Prince of Musignano, subsequently one of the most famous of naturalists, published a quasi-continuation of Wilson's work in four quartos, 1828-1833. Ord's edition of Wilson is the one commonly seen in this country, the original being scarce. We thus