But, to prove that evacuation will not cure the distemper, it is needless to travel back to the first periods of this disease, or to rest the evidence even upon the highest probability. From what occurs in many morbid cases, we have every day evident proof of the insufficiency of any discharge for producing a cure of the venereal disease. _Lues venerea_ often exists at the same time with diseases in which an increase of natural evacuations takes place. None of these diseases, whether the evacuation happens by the salivary glands, as in small-pox, by stool, as in dysentery, or by the skin, as in intermittents, have ever been found to break its force, much less to produce a perfect cure. Besides what happens in natural evacuations, we have likewise proofs of the insufficiency of artificial evacuations for the cure of this disease. Although evacuation, at least by other means than by the use of mercury, is never now employed as a cure for the venereal disease; yet venereal complaints are often complicated with others, for which various evacuations are proper. And while evacuations are, with success, employed for the cure of these, it is found, that the venereal taint either remains unchanged, or is even increased in force. It cannot here be alledged, that the difference of effect depends upon the mode of evacuation. On such occasions, every mode of evacuation has been tried with equal want of success. Even salivation, which was long considered as the only effectual discharge, when excited by other means than by mercury, or even by mercury itself, when externally applied to the organs secreting saliva, has not been found more effectual than other modes of evacuation. In some cases, indeed, mercury received into the mouth by steam, or otherwise, has had good effects; but these were either to be accounted for from its application to the diseased part, or from its introduction into the system. It is, then, sufficiently evident, that evacuation, at least by other means than mercury, does not cure _lues venerea_. To this theory it may be urged as a third, and not less powerful objection than any of the former, that where the evacuation arising from the use of mercury in _lues venerea_ is the greatest, the cure is often retarded; and that mercury never more frequently fails than in those cases where it begins to evacuate upon its first introduction into the system.