We would not have the idea be assumed that syphilis is an incurable disease and is bound to be followed in all cases by the awful manifestations that we have described. There are many thousands of cases of syphilis that never have any of these serious manifestations at all. It is evident that some cases are completely cured and that no deleterious influence remains. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that the presence of this disease in the tissues of either parent during the first five years of its course are almost sure to affect offspring born at this time. The children may suffer from the skin lesions of syphilis in their early life, may suffer from serious eye diseases a little later, and then eventually succumb to nervous and mental diseases resembling paresis and locomotor ataxia in early adult life. In fact it is this transmission of the disease that constitutes one of its saddest pictures, and the sins of the parents are indeed visited on the children. Besides this severer type of social disease, there is what has been called sometimes a milder form. It consists only of a discharge with some fever, which is considered to last not more than a few weeks. As a matter of fact, however, the disease may continue to exist, though the symptoms become latent {325} and the patient may infect others when he least suspects it. This form of disease gives rise to many sad complications in family life. Practically all the severe eye diseases of newly born children, the ophthalmia from which so many eyes are lost, is due to this disease. Special medical care is now taken of these cases, and the serious consequences are not so often seen as used to be the case. Within a score of years, however, about one-half of the inmates of blind asylums owed their loss of sight to this disease. At the present time there still remains a very notable proportion of persons blind from early childhood whose infirmity must be attributed to the sad consequences of the social disease. Most of the sterility in families is due to the same cause. There is an unfortunate impression that usually the woman is responsible in these cases, and not a little sympathy is wasted on the man, because of the absence of children in the family. Almost invariably, however, the real cause of the family misfortune is to be traced to an infectious disease in the man contracted perhaps many years before, of whose presence he may be more or less unconscious, the symptoms have become so slight, but this has proved sufficient to infect the wife and bring about serious changes that preclude all possibility of the procreation of children.