While the researches of the past decade have proved distinctly encouraging, yet we must not blind ourselves to the fact that the foregoing findings, and alike our deductions therefrom, are largely provisional; for we stand in grave danger of over-emphasising the significance of the results forthcoming from the investigation of isolated samples of blood from different individuals. The recorded estimates of the uric acid content of the blood in _strictly normal persons_ are all too few, the findings in _diseased_ subjects too conflicting, to warrant dogmatic inferences, wide generalisations. In truth, the problem is by no means as simple as may at first sight appear, and this but a slight digression will suffice to make clear. _The Significance of Uricæmia._—It is generally maintained that the blood content of uric acid in gout is above normal. Yet the _excretion_ of _uric acid_, save during acute attacks, rests within physiological limits. Again, _à propos_ of our claim that the _blood_ is _surcharged_ therewith, we have the awkward fact, as yet inexplicable on chemical or physico-chemical grounds, that the blood-stream can hold in suspension far more uric acid than has ever yet been met with in gout, according to Bechhold and Ziegler no less than 50 mg. of _uric acid_ per 100 c.c. of blood serum before deposition tends to occur. On the other hand, _urates_ are less soluble therein, not exceeding 2·5 mg. per 100 c.c. How remote from the limit of saturation the highest figures observed in gout! What a large margin of solubility is still available! Again, the uric acid blood content in gout is far less than was formerly thought. Only by a few milligrams does it transcend that found in normal individuals. Can this slight disparity have such profound potentialities as to determine the incidence or not of _gout_? and this with the saturation point still so remote. The urates, too, being practically non-toxic, how difficult to conceive that the almost trivial excess of the uric acid blood content over the normal is adequate to produce the fulminant and dramatic phenomena of acute gout.