at the effect; and quacks have often profited by its existence, to persuade patients that they were affected with an inveterate venereal disease, and thus to dispose of their remedies. This effect arises, as every one knows, from the pressure of the feces in the rectum on the seminal vesicles, and may be removed by removing the constipation. This was the state of science, when Lallemand devoted himself to the study of the diseases of the urinary passages, and enriched it with many important remarks. As, in acute inflammations of the urethra, the irritation sometimes extends, following the course of the seminal passages to the testicles; so, in retentions of urine, produced by chronic inflammation of the prostatic portion of the urethra, the irritation extends more or less to the seminal vesicles and testicles, producing in the former normal contractions, and in the latter an excessive secretion, whence would result a spermatic flux. In patients thus affected, the ejaculation is very sudden: nocturnal pollutions are frequent--or, rather, the semen is expelled during the emission of urine, and of the feces. It is also more liquid, less odorous, and in short less elaborated than usual. In many patients, the venereal desires are nearly extinct; the erections are feeble, imperfect, or even impossible. This spermatorrhœa has general effects, analogous to those which have been attributed to other pollutions: the patients become timid, idle, indifferent to all which is not connected with their disease; all the functions of the economy languish, and are deranged; and, finally, both body and mind are degraded. Lallemand has known all the phenomena which we have described to disappear, on curing the retention of urine--or, rather, the disease of the urethra which caused it--and relates cases of this character. Do not the remarks of this practitioner, compared with our remarks on convulsive spermatorrhœa, and particularly on the different states which the semen may present in this affection--do they not establish clearly, that in many, perhaps in most cases of spermatorrhœa, there is not relaxation, weakness of the seminal vesicles and ejaculatory ducts, but irritation or inflammation of these parts?