M. ZIMMERMAN told me of a man of a remarkably fine genius, to whom pollutions had caused the loss of all the activity of his understanding, and whose body was exactly in that condition described by BOERHAAVE (Section I.) In that Section too may be seen the evils which HOFFMAN observed consequential to pollutions. The most common symptoms, when the disorder has not as yet made any great progress, are, a continual oppression, most considerable in the morning, and acute pains of the loins. Some months ago I was consulted about a laborer in the vines, aged about fifty years, before that time very robust, but whom frequent pollutions had, for three or four months, so prodigiously weakened, that he could not work but a few hours a day. Often he was even totally debarred from it by pains in his loins, which confined him to his bed, and he every day grew leaner. I gave him some advice, of which I could not learn the execution or effect. I knew a man who had become deaf for some weeks on his neglecting a cold, and who, on his having a nocturnal pollution, was, the next day, much deafer than ordinary, with great restlessness and anxiety; and another, whose weakness was owing to many causes, and who, after a pollution, wakes under the greatest oppression, and with so general a numbness, that he is for an hour like a paralytic, and remains the whole day after under a great dejection. In this first class may be put the pollutions of those, who, having been accustomed to frequent emissions, suddenly suspend them. Such were those of a woman whom GALEN makes mention; she had been, for some time, in the state of widow-hood, and the retention of the spermatic liquid brought upon her disorders of the _uterus_. In her sleep she had convulsive motions of her loins, arms, and legs, which were accompanied with an abundant emission of a thick matter, with the same sensations as in the act of coition[143]. A female dancer had received accidentally a slight hurt near her left breast; her surgeon prescribed to her rather a strict diet, and especially forbad her those pleasures to which she was pretty much accustomed. The third night of the privation, to which she had submitted without minding the injunctions of diet, she had a pollution, which returning several times the following nights, made her visibly fall away, and caused to her violent pains of the loins. Her wound, however, did not fail of healing, in a great measure, and would have been quite so, if she had been observant of the surgeon’s rules of diet, who, firm in the principles of his art, continued his prohibition of venery, and bled and purged her. Wearied out, at length, and weakened, she left off his remedies, and, resuming her usual course of life, her weakness and her pains quickly went off.