The changing incidence of convulsions in childhood.

Infantile convulsions have long been an enigma and in spite of the progress of mediial science there emnains much that is still not clear. Ifants have convulsions more often than adults or olier children and for this fact various exlanations have been adduced. The doctrine of peripheral irritation whereby the immaturity of the infant's nervous system was held to result in convuions on the slightest provocation was obviously unsatisfactory and led to the accptance of a fant variety of stimuli to which a particular fit might be attributed. The analogy of the rigor was also inadequate. Rigors in adults are in fact compariel rarely encountered outside malarious areas, and in any case infants are not themselves immune from them.