The decease of this eminent promoter of the interests of the insane, an honorary member of our association, is thus commented upon in the pages of a

journal in his native city.

"Our obituary of this day will recall a name, fraught with no common interest, to many of our citizens. Recollections worthy of being retraced will be aroused in some minds, a sympathetic feeling in many, a respectful recognition of departed worth, perhaps we may say, in all,.

It is one of the most interesting features of the social framework of Britain, that while it recognises the distinctions of feudal rank, and records the exit of each worthy head of a time-honored house, as in some sort the property of the nation, not the less through the various gradations of the scale does it appreciate the successful citizen, the independent yeoman, or even the lowly mechanic, if such an one, filling worthily his station, or rising to a higher sphere, has left to his successors incentives to the like honorable course, "footprints on the sands of time."

Of the burgher or citizen class, was the immediate family of Samuel Tuke. The name of Tuke, early scattered in the counties of Nottingham and South Yorkshire, appears in the seventeenth century in the city of York, where the ancestor of the subject of this sketch, having embraced the principles of the Quakers, suffered imprisonment in consequence, in "Ouse Bridge Prison," in the year 1660.

Samuel Tuke was the eldest grandson of William Tuke, who died in 1822, at the patriarchal age of 90, and whose name is so well known as the founder of the Friends' Retreat, near York, in 1792, and as the originator in this country of those principles in the treatment of insanity, which in their VOL IV. NO. 24.

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progress, have so much contributed to the alleviation of human suffering.

William Tuke's eldest son, Henry Tuke, died at the comparatively early age of 58, not less honored and beloved than his father.

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Samuel Tuke, the only son of Henry, who lived to maturity, was born 31st July, 1784. He early co-operated with his grandfather and father in their philanthropic labours. To the subject of insanity especially, as is well known, he devoted a large portion of his time, and in the course of his life was the author of several works which are well known on the Continent and in America, as well as in this country. His "Description of the Retreat was published in 1813, and led to very remarkable consequences, consequences which the author himself had never ventured to anticipate.. Steadily did he pursue his labours in the great work of bettering the condition of the insane, not only by his writings, but by the unremitting attention which he paid to the welfare of the Retreat, of which he was the treasurer for thirty years. Not inaptly has he been called "the Friend of the Insane."

In 1840, he edited the work of a German physician, Dr. Jacobi; in the introduction to which he fully expresses his views in regard to the provision for the insane, and their moral management, with many practical directions regarding the construction of asylums.

But to many of the readers of this memoir (in this city) it is as the public man and the active citizen that Samuel Tuke will be chiefly remembered. To some, as the man of warm, deep, and abiding sympathies, in private life; to not a few by the earnestness, the deeply devotional spirit, the catholicity of feeling, yet lofty standard of Christian obligation, which marked his religious character.

He was never a party man. His mind was simply incapable of being so moulded. Every line of action which he adopted, however much it might provoke hostility in those who honestly took a different view, was simply the result of some great principle, firmly grasped and rigidly carried out. Thus, he early supported the concession of political privileges to the Roman Catholics, when a very different view might have been expected from association and training. Yet his mind was essentially conservative, in the sense of a deep feeling of the venerable-intense in proportion to the moral worth associated with it. Equally strong was his love of social order, his idea of government as the embodiment of a governing moral force.