Title. Eastern Lunatic Asylum...... Dr. John M. Galt.... 1817 1818 1821 New York.... Hartford...... Lexington.... Columbia.... Western Lunatic Asylum..... Staunton..... Dr. J. H. Worthington... Williamsburg. Va..... State... Butler Hospital for Insane... Lunatic Asylum...... Hospital for the Insane.. Insane Asylum..... Trenton .... ...... ... Patients at latest dates. 257 62 188 151 226 237 192 379 379 106 523 438 252 241 754 252 158 255 188 197 27 532 135 334 157 300 280 231 171 U. S. Gov't Hosp. for Insane.. n. Washington D. C... U. S..... consists in the administrations of medicines, as in other diseases. And here it is important to observe that there is no specific medicine for the cure of insanity. In each case such medical remedies are employed as are indicated by the bodily symptoms, precisely as in other forms of corporeal disease. The moral treatment consists of the wholesome discipline of a well-regulated household, regular hours for food and for sleep, manual employments, reading, lectures, and other intellectual exercises and entertainments, and various recreations and amusements, both within-doors (a) This title is generally used, for brevity; the real one is "Asylum for Persons deprived of the Use of their Reason." (b) The Maryland Hospital was a mixed institution, having only a department for the insane, until about the year 1846. Dr. Charles H. Nichols...... 140 and without. The great object of this treatment is to procure a healthful exercise of the body, to abstract the mind from its delusions, to win back the patient to the regular and useful habits and practices of his former life. So important is this branch of treatment that, other things being equal, that hospital will be the best which possesses and keeps in operation the most elaborate means of pursuing it. And so extensive have these means become, in some of the hospitals, that, what with libraries, museums, newspapers, lectures, musical instruments, horses and carriages, (c) We have no information in regard to the exact time at which this "Department" was established, but it was near the period at which it is here placed. (a) This was called "The Hamilton County Lunatic Asylum" until the year 1860. bowling-alleys, billiard-tables, &c., even a sane man to whom a somewhat retired situation is not distasteful may there find plentiful resources for the leading of a comfortable, pleasant, and intellectual life. method of preventing the attack of any disease is to preserve one's self from the influence of the causes of that disease. He who would evade the intermittent fever must not expose himself to the malaria whence the intermittent originates. We have seen that the sources of insanity are in the customs, habits, and other influences of civilized life. The necessary inference is, that if we would escape insanity we must lead a life as near to nature as is possible amid all the surrounding arti ficialities of civilization. It has been shown that, descending more nearly to particulars, the approximate causes of the disorder are those acts or agents which exhaust or depress the nervous power, and consequently debilitate the whole system. The man, then, who would secure immunity from insanity must either wholly avoid those acts or agents, or preserve a constant watchfulness to prevent himself from being subjected to their operation to the extent of exhaustion or great depression. He must be moderate in all things, curbing his appetites and passions, shield Reader, call not such places "mad-houses." Conjure up no fanciful visions of dungeons, whips, and fetters in connection with them! Throw aside the names, the prejudices, and the errors of the past! Forgive, even if you cannot forget, the cruelties which once were practised in the receptacles for the unfortunate insane,-receptacles which from the very practice of those cruelties, and hence on account of the officers and employees, might properly have been called "madhouses," rather than because the persons confined therein were suffering from mental disorder! The hospitals are now under a government widely different, in principles as well as in practice, from that of those receptacles. Of their superintendents it may be said-and we speak from a personal acquaintance with thirty of them, and from much knowledge, by correspondence and other-ing himself, as far as possible, from the manifold wise, with most of the others-that, as a whole, they are a highly respectable class of intellectual, well-educated physicians, kind in disposition, and ambitious to bring their hospitals, each and all, to the highest point of perfection in every thing which will promote the cure of their patients, with the maximum of the comforts and amenities of life, and the minimum of every thing which carries pain either to the body or the mind of a fellow-being. Perhaps we cannot more briefly and fully express our opinion of the usefulness of these establishments, aside from the great question of the cure of their patients, than by the statement of our belief that, were all their inmates transferred this day to their homes and the other places whence they came, the amount of restraint, coercion, and severity which, upon any day a week hence, would be resorted to in the management of them, would be fifty-fold greater than it is to-day in the hospitals, and that in the course of a year the number of suicides would be ten times as large as it would have been had they remained where they now are. Inasmuch as every person is liable to an attack of insanity, it is desirable that all should know by what means it may be avoided. Science has furnished no preventive, 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. It is rational to conclude that the most certain causes of bodily disease, remembering that nature has been kindly mindful of her children in supplying them with an exhaustless fountain of the purest drink, without either fermentation or distillation, making neither gold nor power nor fame his god, mistaking neither nervous excitement for religion, nor high political agitation for a healthful preserver of good government; tempering his grief by a prudent judgment, and converting his disappointments into counsellors of wisdom; accepting all the blessings, whether physical, intellectual, or moral, which a bountiful Providence has bestowed upon him, and wisely using them "as not abusing" them. A few words upon one specific point of this subject, and we shall have finished. Sleep is the great recuperative agent of nervous power, the regenerator of vital vigor, and consequently one of the surest preventives of mental disorder. Perhaps it may be truthfully asserted that so long as a person obtains sufficient sleep he will not become insane. Well has the poet written of it:— "Tired nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep!" And no less truthfully, though somewhat more queerly and ludicrously, has the simple Sancho Panza exclaimed, "Blessed be the man who first invented sleep! it covereth a man all over, like a cloak;" and the honest squire might have added, "It preserveth the mind from insanity, as the cloak preserveth the body from cold." IRON-CLAD WAR-VESSELS. EUROPEAN as well as American authorities accord to Robert L. Stevens, of New Jersey, the credit of putting the undeveloped idea of iron-clad ships, suggested by his father half a century ago, and urged by Paixhan ten years after, into practicable shape, by means of his experiments, calculations, and rare mechanical ingenuity. The Stevens Battery was designed and partially completed before the art of fighting armored vessels had been tested, in a rude way, at Kinburn; and the action at Hampton Roads in March, 1862, which marks as distinct an era in history as gunpowder itself, not only revolutionized naval warfare at a stroke, but, as it will appear, indicated the direction of further improvement. The subject may be considered under the heads of Armor, which will necessarily include some account of ordnance and its probable progress, and the Structure of Ships. As it will, of course, be impossible within the limits of this paper to enter into the details of fact and argument which a subject of such importance and novelty really demands, it is but just to state that the author is preparing a more complete and fully illustrated account (to be published by Van Nostrand, of New York) of the experiments and practice, the best professional opinion, and the results of his own recent observations, here and in Europe. ARMOR. 1st. Thickness required.-This is obviously a question of the power of ordnance. However American ingenuity may have provided against probable hard hits, the English have certainly hammered out of innumerable targets not only an approximate law, but a tolerably uniform measure of resistance. The upshot of numerous experiments is that the best solid armor (in distinction from armor that is laminated, or composed of strata of thin plates), backed with 18 inches of hard wood, laid on the skin of the ship, is proof against their own most formidable service gun, the 68pdr. smooth-bore with 16 lbs. of powder at short range, say 200 yards. But English experimental guns-by far the most powerful ever fabricatedhave proved, within a few months, the inadequacy of such protection against the service ordnance of a future not distant; and British and French authorities are at this moment extremely solicitous as to the safety of their costly vessels already clad in this manner, and perplexed as to the method of plating their partially-constructed fleets. This brings us to Modern heavy ordnance: its results and improvement.-The Armstrong gun is a series of tubes turned without and within, and shrunk over one another. The tubes are thus formed. A wrought-iron bar is wound into a close coil, which is hammered on end and thus welded into a ring. The required number of rings are tongued, grooved, and then welded, end to end, by the pressure of a screw. The part of one of the tubes that forms the breech-piece is forged solid (and, in case of breech-loaders, bored out), to give the gun longitudinal strength. The Armstrong “300pdr." has 11 feet length and 101⁄2 inches diameter of bore, 38 inches maximum diameter, and weighs 101⁄2 tons. The Mersey Iron-Works guns are forged from wrought iron, either solid, like steamboat-shafts, or hollow, by laying up staves in the form of a barrel and welding layers of curved plates upon them until the whole mass is united, Only a few of these guns have been fabricated. The most remarkable are, 1st, the Horsfall smoothbored 270-pdr., forged solid, and of 13 inches bore, 44 inches maximum diameter, and 24 tons weight; 2d. The Alfred Rifle gun, lately in the Great Exhibition, has a 10-inch bore, and was forged hollow; 3d. The 12-inch smooth-bore, now in the Brooklyn Navy-Yard, is very light, but has fired a double 224-lb. shot with 45 pounds of powder. If hooped on the principle adopted by Blakely and to be mentioned further on, it would make a much more formidable gun than any of our cast-iron pieces. Blakely has constructed for Russia two 13-inch smooth-bore guns, 15 feet long and 47 inches in maximum diameter, of cast iron hooped with steel. The 15-inch Rodman smooth-bore cast-iron gun, now at Fortress Monroe, is 4 feet in maximum diameter and 16 feet long. It was cast hollow, and cooled from the inside to prevent unequal contraction and initial rupturing strain. The Dahlgren 15-inch guns on the Monitors are better shaped, and about 4 feet shorter. Krupp, of Prussia, forges cast-steel guns of 9 inches bore from ingots of 20 tons weight. The 10-inch Armstrong gun has thrown a spherical 150-lb. shot, with 50 pounds of powder, through a 5-inch plate and its 9-inch teak backing, at 200 yards, and one out of four shots, with the same charge, through the standard or Warrior target, viz.: a 42-inch solid plate, 18 inches of teak, and 5-inch iron lining. The Horsfall 13-inch gun has sent a spherical 270-lb. shot with 74 lbs. of powder entirely through the Warrior target at 200 yards, making an irregular hole about two feet in diameter. The same charge at 800 yards did not make a clean breech. A 7-inch Armstrong gun, rifled on Whitworth's plan, has, with 23 lbs. of powder, driven a 130-lb. “homogeneous metal" (low cast-steel) shell, holding a bursting-charge of three pounds of powder, through the same target, exploding it in the backing; and more recently it has thrown a 150-lb. shell through a 54-inch plate, backing and all, bursting it in what represented the ship beyond. Experiments on smash ing 15-inch shells against targets are now in progress at Washington. The Blakely guns have rarely been tried against iron protection, on account of official jealousy and other unworthy reasons. The practical question, as may be inferred from the foregoing results, and as established by all others, is, What gun will stand the most powder? Now, the destructive effect of projectiles is not proportionate directly to their weight and diameter, but to the squares of their velocities. For example, the 150-lb. shot above mentioned, driven with 50 lbs. of powder at 1770 feet per second, has nearly twice the destructive effect upon striking, and nearly four times as much upon passing its whole bulk through, an iron plate, as the 425-lb. shot driven from the 15-inch gun with the same powder but at only 800 feet velocity. The strains to which heavy guns are subjected are-1st, The statical pressure of the powder-gas. To meet this, there must be uniform tensile strength; that is, not only tenacity, but homogeneity in the gun-metal. 2d, The percussive force of the gas and the projectile, to be resisted by hardness of the bore. Cast iron is obviously insufficient in tenacity; bronze, in hardness, if not in strength; and wrought iron forged in large masses, in homogeneity, if not in resistance to compression. 3d, But there is another most important condition of strain. The explosion of the powder is so instantaneous that, supposing the gun to be a series of concentric tubes, the exterior tubes do not have time to act before the inner ones are strained beyond endurance. To meet this condition, it was proposed by Treadwell of Massachusetts, and is successfully practised by Blakely, and, after him, Whitworth of England, and, partially, by Parrott of New York, to hoop an inner tube with rings having a successively higher initial tension. The inner tube is therefore under compression, and the outer ring under a considerable tension, when the gun is at rest, but all parts of a mass of any thickness are strained and at work simultaneously and alike when the gun is under fire. This promises to be an essential principle in the fabrication of large guns. A fourth cause of strain is the enlargement of the inner part of a gun by the heat of frequent successive explosions. The perfect remedy for this and many other causes of failure would be perfect elasticity. Cast steel is obviously superior to other gunmetals not only in this quality, but in tenacity and hardness. On the whole, it would appear that the constantly improving and increasing production of steel in large masses, and the mechanical perfection of the method of hooping referred to, will shortly multiply service ordnance which shall be at least equal to the European experimental guns described. It is against such ordnance, then, that we have to protect our warvessels. The comparative merits of rifles and smooth-bores, and of large and small calibres with a given strain on the gun, and of wrought iron employed to a certain extent on Armstrong's plan, and of bronze hoops to equalize expansion by heat, and of various improvements in fabrication, are subjects of interest, but not of primary importance to our present inquiry. The practicability of increasing the velocity of the shot without augmenting the strain on the gun, by means of an elastic cushion, as of air, around the cartridge, and of accelerating charges by means of compressed powder, &c., can only be mentioned here as additional elements of promise in the perfection of ordnance. All these subjects will be more fully discussed in the forthcoming work referred to. This The armor of European vessels consists, in nearly all cases, of 4-inch solid plates and 18 inches wood backing. The Minotaur class of English ships will be plated with 51⁄2 inches of solid iron on 9 inches of wood. The Roanoke and New Ironsides (American) have 42-inch solid armor backed by 24 to 30 inches of oak. protection, then, although a tolerable match for the best cast-iron ordnance, of which the 68-pdr., measured by powder burned and work done, is a fair representative (excepting the 15-inch Columbiad, which can hardly be called a tried service gun as yet), is probably no better than a wooden wall against the new ordnance that it may soon have to cope with. The Monitor class of vessels, however, have 10, 11, and 24 inches of iron armor; but it is laminated armor; and this brings us to another stage of our inquiry. 2d. Solid and laminated plates compared.-In Europe, laminated armor has been altogether abandoned, even as a matter of further experiment, partly because direct trials have proved it inferior, and partly because all experiments have seemed to establish the law that the resistance of plates is as the square of their thickness; for example, that one 4-inch plate is twice as strong as two 2-inch plates. The direct trial was the complete penetration of an 8-inch target, and the serious indentation and fracture of a 10-inch target (both composed of layers of good plates, generally 5% inch thick) stayed together every 8 inches) by a 68-pdr. smooth-bore and a 100-pdr. rifle at 200 yards, guns against which 41⁄2-inch solid plates are proof. But there was no wood behind the laminated targets. To what extent backing would have modified the result, the experimenters themselves do not pretend to know; yet they are satisfied without undertaking further trials. It is nowhere urged that wood backing adds to the strength of the plate before it in any important degree. Its use can only be to distribute and soften the blow on the structure behind, -the ribs of the vessel. On the contrary, the more recent experiments in America, official and otherwise, indicate the superiority of laminated armor. A target 61⁄2 inches thick, composed of inch and half-inch each other, but are actually weakened by the boltholes through which they are held in place. 3d. Vertical and Inclined Armor.-The general conclusion from experiments here and abroad is that a given thickness of iron measured on the line of fire offers equal resistance to shot, as they average, whether it is vertical or inclined. In England, a 34-inch solid plate set at an angle of 45° was more injured by elongated 100-pound shot than a 42-inch solid vertical plate, both plates being of equal weight for the same vertical height. In America, a 6-inch laminated vertical target was indented about four times as deeply by a 125pound spherical shot as a 634-inch laminated plate at an angle of 2710. Round shot are certainly glanced by inclined armor, which has only to change the direction of the projectile, instead of stopping it. But flat-headed bolts are not glanced except when the armor lies at an impracticably flat angle. In Europe, inclined protection is wholly abandoned for the sides of vessels, on account of its cost, inconvenience, and waste of room in seagoing ships especially; and it is intended to construct some of Capt. Coles's cupolas or turrets with vertical sides. plates, was but slightly indented by a 125-pound | impart no such strength to the ship or help to shot and 10 pounds of powder. But it should be observed that American experiments are made with heavy shot at velocities which are necessarily low, because the guns will not stand the extraordinary charges required to give heavy shot a high velocity. A laminated plate, with its considerable range of elasticity, has time enough to bend and spring, if hit by a slow ball, however heavy. But a rapid ball allows no chance for the operation of elasticity. A cannon-ball thrown against a copper caldron, for instance, by hand, will greatly indent it, and rebound; but a pistolshot will pass through without springing or bulging it. Again, the best solid forged plates tried in England are undoubtedly superior to those usually tested here; for, although American iron is naturally better than English, it cannot be equally well worked by our lighter machinery. In fact, the fractures of many of our thick plates exhibit brittleness and hardness not observed in the best English, although the tensile strength of the former may be higher. The resistance of either laminated or solid plates to punching in a machine is directly as the area fractured, that is to say, as the total thickness. It is, therefore, assumed by some that their resistance to shot is the same. The resistance does appear to be as the fractured area; but that area is not the same with solid and laminated plates of equal aggregate thickness. In the former the shot-hole is conical, about the size of the shot in front, say 8 inches, but from 20 to 30 inches on the back; while the hole made in the latter by the same ball is more nearly cylindrical, and hence its area of fracture is much less. It is also observed that a rolled solid plate, though of equally good material, does not stand shot as well as a forged solid plate of equal thickness, because, as the strata composing the former are not thoroughly welded to each other, however homogeneous they may be individually, the rolled plate is in fact a series of thin plates, and is fractured like a laminated target. Finally, since it was the utmost work of a 150-lb. shot, with 50 pounds of powder and nearly 1800 feet velocity, to punch the best 42-inch solid armor, while the 8 inches of laminated armor above mentioned did not stand a 68-pdr. with 16 pounds of powder and less than 1600 feet velocity, the difference in resistance is quite sufficient to establish the superiority of the solid plate and leave a large margin for possible defects in the quality of the other. Still, our present knowledge of the subject is far from satisfactory. Further experiments, with uniform conditions, are very necessary. The cost of laminated armor is less than half that of thick plates. But its best feature is the strength it imparts to the vessel, and the facility with which it can be put on. A series of thin plates, breaking joints and bolted through the backing, not only fasten each other, but are in effect a continuous girder; while thick plates Steel Armor.-It was at first supposed that high tensile strength and hardness would be as important elements in armor as in other structures designed to resist percussion and strain; and the term "steel-clad" ships was at once adopted in popular literature. In 1861, all the British iron and steel makers were invited to provide targets of their various products, for test. Cast steel, puddled steel, homogeneous metal, Bessemer steel, and hard and soft irons of many qualities, were fired at by 68 and 100 pounders, with the uniform result that the damage to the target was substantially in proportion to its hardness. Copper, however, was too soft. It was found that to avoid crumbling due to brittleness on the one hand, and easy punching due to extreme softness on the other, a tough, ductile iron, though not necessarily of the highest tensile strength, was the best medium to resist shot. Softness is a necessary element; but if hardness could be obtained without brittleness, it would, of course, be desirable. It is possible that a very low Bessemer steel, or rather iron, may yet be cheaply adapted to the service; but at present all steel and hard iron are inadequate. THE STRUCTURE OF WAR-VESSELS. 1st. Speed-Rams. Although Stevens so fully appreciated the importance of high speed ten years ago as to put above 8000 horse-power in a war-vessel which with 4000 would have run as fast as any other war-vessel, no one else, either here or abroad, seems to have appreciated the immense importance of this subject, at least until Ericsson designed the Puritan and the Dictator. Indeed, if the choice lay between speed and protection, it |