Diabetic gangrene often begins in some small area of injured skin, such as might readily occur in a foot tortured with gout; it ulcerates, is exceedingly painful, and possessed of a stench quite peculiar to its horrid self. It does not confine itself to one foot, or to one area of a leg, but suddenly appears in an apparently healthy portion, having surreptitiously worked its way along beneath the skin; its first sign is often a painful swelling which ulcerates. The patient dies either from toxæmia due to the gangrene, or from diabetic coma; and fifty-three days is not an unlikely period for the torture to continue. On the whole it would seem that diabetic gangrene appearing in a man who has arterio-sclerosis is a probable explanation of Philip’s death. The really interesting part of this historical diagnosis is the way in which it explains his treatment of the Netherlands. What justice could they have received from a man tortured and rendered petulant with gout and gloomy with diabetes? Charles V had taken no care of himself, but had gone roaring and fighting and guzzling and drinking all over Europe; Philip had led a very quiet, studious, and abstemious life, and therefore he lived nearly twenty years longer than his father. Possibly when he came to suffer the torments of his death he may have thought the years not worth his self-denial: possibly he may have regretted that he did not have a good time when he was young, but this is not likely, for he was a very conscientious man. When Philip lay dying he held in his hand the common little crucifix that his mother and father had adored when they too had died; his friends buried it upon his breast when they came to inter him in the Escorial, where it still lies with him in a coffin made of the timbers of the _Cinco Chagas_, not the least glorious of his fighting galleys.