The admission for the year ending June 30, 1889, have been 280; the discharges, including 114 deaths, have been 244, leaving 1,397 under treatment at the close of the year. The recoveries are reported as 70, being 28.69 per cent. of the discharges, including deaths. The daily average number in the hospital has been 1,373, which shows a steady increase in its population. The per cent. of deaths to the daily average number resident is 8.30, which is very nearly the average per cent. for the last ten years and is considerably below what the advanced age of so large a proportion of the hospital inmates would lead us to expect. The veterans of the late war continue to be received in undiminished numbers from the Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, although each returning season thins their ranks in the outside world' and adds to the burden of years of the survivors. How long the increased number of admissions from the home will continue it is impossible to foretell, but, probably, it will be some years yet before the advancing mortality will more than counterbalance the increase in mental disease, resulting from the infirmities of age conjoined with that inertia of life and loss of ambition and energy which seems to be inseparable from those conditions that compel the old soldier to take refuge in that asylum.

The increase in the number of patients from the District of Columbia has not been as great as in one or two former years. While a temporary diminution in the number of admissions has probably resulted from an embarassment from want of appropriations in defraying the expenses of the jury trial which the decision of the court in regard to the law of commitment has rendered necessary, probably more is due to a commendable energy on the part of the District authorities in returning to the several homes from whence they had set out the lunatics of varying degree who come from the East and from the West and from the North and from the South, to make Washington their headquarters. Whoever has a grievance, or a new scheme of government, or a call to enlighten Congress, or to help the President in his appointments, or a new gospel to proclaim all these and as many more go to swell the tide which is constantly setting in towards the District of Columbia, a tide that, unlike all other tides, never of its own accord turns out to sea. But for the vigilant watch and prompt action of the authorities in returning these people with a mission to the neighborhoods whence they sprung, the rural districts would shortly be depleted of their insane, while this hospital was being overcrowded with them.

Of the additional accommodations that have been recently made, and the advantages resulting to the hospital therefrom, a word is proper here. The extensions of the lodges for the colored insane, particularly that for the females, seems to have made an actual change in the character of many of the patients. Crowded into insufficient quarters they

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