Leprosy, as is well known, is a disease prevalent all over the world, from Norway and Sweden in the north, to India and China in the east, and to Australia and the Islands of the Southern Seas. My own personal experience, however, has been limited only to India, where I have had the disease under close observation for nearly twenty years. It would be out of place to enter into any technical or scientific description of its nature and progress in a work of this kind. All are aware that a Commission, composed of five men, most competent to undertake the investigation of the history of the disease in all its bearings, is now sitting in India, and their report, which will be made public at the end of the year, will doubtless give information which will be of the utmost value in establishing means for its amelioration and, probably, ultimate extinction. My service in India has placed me in a district where, unfortunately, leprosy is exceedingly prevalent amongst the native population, although not entirely limited to those alone; for I have had cases of Europeans also to deal with. This led me to take the matter up, more from the hope of relieving suffering than from any other motive, the miserable victims being allowed to wander about as simple beggars, outcasts from their own friends and villages. They thus transform themselves, if not into a danger to their fellow-creatures, at least into a most objectionable nuisance and eye-sore to the whole community. To look upon the streets and roads of an Indian Station on Sunday morning (and this was the manner these wretched creatures adopted to enlist the sympathies of their fellow beings in my own station), lined with rows of lepers, exhibiting their disgusting sores and their maimed and deformed bodies to the public gaze, was a sight that could not fail to touch the hardest and most indifferent heart. To prevent the daily exhibition of these harrowing scenes, I enlisted the sympathy of the general public, and was able, as shown in the report of the Dehra Dun Leper Asylum, mentioned elsewhere in this work, to establish and endow a retreat for all who would take advantage of its comforts and benefits. I had no difficulty whatever in inducing all the afflicted--old and young, men and women--to take up their quarters therein. Before admission, all agree to become _permanent_ residents and to live apart. I had studied with care the beneficial effects of segregation which had been adopted in the retreats in Norway and Sweden, with the marked diminution in the number of cases imported during the decades succeeding the foundation of these institutions, and, acting on this principle, the Dehra Dun Leper Asylum was opened in 1879, and has been in existence ever since. There the sexes are strictly segregated, and the inmates live and are cared for under the most happy conditions. Throughout those years I have had constant opportunity, there, of studying the nature and progress of the disease.