The Professor M. STEHELIN mentions a man of letters, who was afflicted with an involuntary efflux of seed, without any ideas of venery, and who was cured by the use of wine with the martials and the bark. The remedies, and among others the waters of Swalbach, the embrocating with cold water the _pubis_ and the _perinæum_, had not the same success with a young man, who had brought upon himself this disorder by self-pollution. He adds, that M. DE BONGARS, a celebrated Practitioner of Physic at Maseck, had cured two persons attacked with a debility of the _vesiculæ seminales_, by making them take, three times a day, eight or ten drops of SYDENHAM’s _liquid laudanum_, in a glass of Pontac wine, and by a decoction of _sarsaparilla_. M. STEHELIN remarks, that though the opium is contrary to the indications, it has been advised by ETMULLERUS _against too quick an ejaculation, where owing to an over-spirituousness in the seed_. Be it here allowed me to add, that on attentively examining the advice of this famous practitioner, and on comparing the nature of the disorder, in certain cases, with the effects of opium, it is not difficult to conceive, that this remedy may sometimes be useful, but not in the case for which he prescribes it. He distinguishes, with a great deal of accuracy, the different kinds of runnings, he assigns the causes and the curative method of each kind, and then passing on to the ejaculation which comes just on the beginning of an erection, too quick (_nimis citam_,) he lays down two causes for it; first, the relaxation of the _vesiculæ seminales_; secondly, too boiling, too spirituous, too redundant a seminal liquid; and in this case it is that he orders opium[162]. But on what foundation? Opium, the quality of which, as a provocative to venery, stands so well demonstrated, a quality which ETMULLERUS himself points out, both in his small treatise on this medicine, and in this very place where he gives this advice, cannot but augment the cause of the disorder, and consequently thereby aggravate its symptoms. But the cases in which it may be of service, are, on the contrary, where the humors are crude, thin, aqueous, and the nerves, at the same time, of an excessive mobility. It is then known to be a remedy for these different accidents, that it suspends the irritability, and that it stops all the evacuations except perspiration. It cannot then be too often inculcated, that the greatest attention must be had not to prescribe opium, or opiates, but where they are proper, otherwise they are capable of doing great mischief. M. TRALLES, in his excellent work, furnishes us with an observation, and the like is to be met with in other authors, which ought to oblige us to use a great deal of circumspection as to that medicine.