Dr. van Loon, the 'Psychiater and Neurologist of the S.T.O.V.I.A., Batavia', has had the opportunity of studying cases of Amok and Lattah at close quarters in the temporary lunatic asylum in Batavia, and he gives us a clearer insight into these conditions than has hitherto been presented.

Amok is usually regarded as 'a sudden attack of mad rage of the Malay man' in which he 'blindly attacks everybody he comes across, very often injuring and killing a good many people before he is "laid low, " as the saying goes'; but van Loon finds that 'the cause of the aggressive attack is not temper or rage, but an agony of fear, the patient in his hallucination imagining himself to be attacked by a tiger, a snake or a human enemy'. The