All of which goes to show how easy it may be for a masked pretender to impose on credulous humanity, for nothing is more clearly established in modern knowledge than the fact that "gale repercutee" was simply a name to hide a profound ignorance; no such disease exists or ever did exist. Gale itself is a sufficiently tangible reality, to be sure, but it is a purely local disease of the skin, due to a perfectly definite cause, and the dire internal conditions formerly ascribed to it have really no causal connection with it whatever. This definite cause, as every one nowadays knows, is nothing more or less than a microscopic insect which has found lodgment on the skin, and has burrowed and made itself at home there. Kill that insect and the disease is no more; hence it has come to be an axiom with the modern physician that the itch is one of the three or four diseases that he positively is able to cure, and that very speedily. But it was far otherwise with the physicians of the first third of our century, because to them the cause of the disease was an absolute mystery. It is true that here and there a physician had claimed to find an insect lodged in the skin of a sufferer from itch, and two or three times the claim had been made that this was the cause of the malady, but such views were quite ignored by the general profession, and in 1833 it was stated in an authoritative medical treatise that the "cause of gale is absolutely unknown." But even at this time, as it curiously happened, there were certain ignorant laymen who had attained to a bit of medical knowledge that was withheld from the inner circles of the profession. As the peasantry of England before Jenner had known of the curative value of cow-pox over small-pox, so the peasant women of Poland had learned that the annoying skin disease from which they suffered was caused by an almost invisible insect, and, furthermore, had acquired the trick of dislodging the pestiferous little creature with the point of a needle. From them a youth of the country, F. Renucci by name, learned the open secret. He conveyed it to Paris when he went there to study medicine, and in 1834 demonstrated it to his master Alibert. This physician, at first sceptical, soon was convinced, and gave out the discovery to the medical world with an authority that led to early acceptance.