their own class and so resort to prostitutes. On the whole, however, it will be seen, the poison of syphilis is fairly diffused among all classes. This poison may work through many years or even the whole of life, and its early manifestations are the least important. It may begin before birth: thus, one recent investigation shows that in 150 syphilitic families there were only 390 seemingly healthy children to 401 infant deaths, stillbirths, and miscarriages (as against 172 in 180 healthy families), the great majority of these failures being infant deaths and thus representing a large amount of wasted energy and expense.[3] Syphilis is, again, the most serious single cause of the most severe forms of brain disease and insanity, this often coming on many years after the infection, and when the early symptoms were but slight. Blindness and deafness from the beginning of life are in a large proportion of cases due to syphilis. There is, indeed, no organ of the body which is not liable to break down, often with fatal results, through syphilis, so that it has been well said that a doctor who knows syphilis thoroughly is familiar with every branch of his profession. Gonorrhoea is a still commoner disease than syphilis; how common it is very difficult to say. It is also an older disease, for the ancient Egyptians knew it, and the Biblical King Esarhaddon of Assyria, as the records of his court show, once caught it. It seems to some people no more serious than a common cold, yet it is able to inflict much prolonged misery on its victims, while on the race its influence in the long run is even more deadly than that of syphilis, for gonorrhoea is the chief cause of sterility in women, that is to say, in from 30 to 50 per cent. of such cases, while of cases of sterility in men (which form a quarter to a third of the whole) gonorrhoea is the cause in from 70 to 90 per cent. The inflammation of the eyes of the new-born leading to blindness is also in 70 per cent. cases due to gonorrhoea in the mother, and this occurs in over six per 1,000 births.