THE leading article in the JOURNAL of May I6th, " On the Comparative Study of Drunkenness", was instructive as well as personally interesting to me. It is a favourable omen when a general fact is made so practically available to diagnosis. As to the special points discussed, I would only add that injuries to the head, especially to the basilar region, may be mistaken for drunkenness, as they sometimes are, since they cause very similar symptoms. The facts of "reduction" have been long applied by me to mental pathology under the term "reversion". I write, howeve%, more especially to ask the favour of space in the JOURNAL for the correction of an error as to the date of my first introduction of the Reflex Function of the Brain to the profession. Dr. Carpenter, as quoted in your leader, has always fixed i844 as the date, which is an error that I ought perhaps to have corrected sooner. It is true, that on September 28th, i844, I read a paper " On the Reflex Function of the Brain" to the medical section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, then meeting at York. But, on reference to that paper (which, with an important appendix, was printed in the January number of the British and Foreign Medical Review for 1845), the following introductory sentences will be found. Four years have elapsed since I published my opinion, supported by such arguments as I could then state, that the brain, although the organ of consciousness, is subject to the laws of reflex action, and that, in this respect, it does not differ from the other ganglia of the nervous system. I was led to this opinion by the general principle that the ganglia within the cranium, being a continuation of the spinal cord, must necessarily be regulated, as to their reaction on external agencies, by laws identical with those governing the spinal ganglia, and their analogues in the lower animals. And I was confirmed in this opinion by finding, after the investigation and collocation of known facts, that observations and arguments like those satisfactorily adduced in proof of the existence of the reflex function of the spinal ganglia, may be brought forward in proof that the cerebral ganglia have similar endowments. In the present paper, I propose to give these proofs connectedly."