patent medicines for local application containing cocaine are frequently employed in the treatment of this supposed constitutional disease, with the result of aggravating the original degeneracy. As the youth under the stress of puberty frequently ascribes all his ills to catarrh, he also employs very frequently snuffs containing cocaine, and has his nervous condition much aggravated thereby. Among the nostrums urged in the newspapers and magazines for this condition, so often resultant on nerve stress, is a certain notorious snuff containing 3 per cent. of cocaine. From the description given by Johnson of the _coquero_ there can be no doubt but tramps, errabund lunatics, and paupers result from this habit, to give birth to degenerates in the next generation. Lead has been found to produce in those exposed to its fumes a systemic nervous exhaustion, characterised by local paralysis about the wrist as well as the general symptoms of profound systemic nerve tire. This may result, as Tanquerel des Planches[164] pointed out nearly half a century ago, in acute insanity of the confusional type followed very often by forms of mental disorder of a chronic type resembling paretic dementia. In some cases the patient recovers from the acute insanity to suffer thereafter from epilepsy. In other cases, as Kiernan has shown,[165] an irritable suspicional condition results, in which the patient may live for years, marry, and leave offspring. This last condition and the epileptic are the most dangerous as to the production of degeneracy. As has already been pointed out, the women employed in the pottery factories in Germany suffer according to Rennert[166] from a form of lead poisoning which produces decidedly degenerative effects upon the offspring. These women had frequent abortions, often produced deaf-mutes, and very frequently macrocephalic children. Brass workers suffer from a very similar nervous condition to that produced by lead. Hogden,[167] of Birmingham, called attention to the grave forms of nervous exhaustion produced among brass-workers. The period during which the patient is able to pursue the occupation without breaking down is longer than that of the lead workers. Women, like men, are exposed to this condition. The chief effect produced, so far as offspring have been observed, is chiefly frequent abortions and infantile paralysis.