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This second volume of Weygandt's work on forensic psychiatry will be a valuable aid to those who are called on to give opinions as to responsibility for crimes or to determine the capacity for performing certain military and civil functions. Dr. Weygandt gives prominence to the view that the opinion of the psychiatrist is more than one among a number of factors of equal importance in a judiciary process, being often the cornerstone for the whole foundation upon which to base a decision. After discussing the laws and usages peculiar to German courts in regard to seeking expert psychiatric evidence, he enters upon the subject of forensic psychiatry in general, discussing it under the heads of the technique for making examinations to determine responsibility; malingering; the special forms of insanity with the degrees of incompetency entailed thereby; the symptoms, prognosis, etc. He also discusses the difficulties sometimes encountered by the psychiatrist in cases where the judges, unable to find any normal motive for a deed, call for an explanation of abnormal conditions which might furnish a connection between the mental attitude of the criminal and the crime. These difficulties, he states, are especially perplexing where the abnormalities are of transitory nature. Some suggestions are given which the psychiatrist would do well to keep in mind in solving such problems, i.e., the person in question may have suffered from a frustrated form of one of the neuroses or psychoses; there may have been temporary impulsive insanity; or automatic actions; or emotional paralysis, or extreme exhaustion; or intoxication from loss of sleep. In many cases alcohol or a latent syphilis of the nervous system may furnish the clue to the condition.
In regard to hypnotism, the author states that it has a certain forensic significance, for it lies within the range of possibility that crimes may be committed by persons who have been placed in an unconscious condition by hypnotism. It has ne