In common cases of the disease, the losses of semen are as often as two or three times a week; not uncommonly, every night, for a week or two; and then an interval of a week, when the nightly ejaculations occur with a dreamy, erotic pleasure, with the patient half sleeping. The young man wakes up and finds his linen soiled: he remembers his dream and is highly disgusted, and soon visits or writes to a traveling or standing venerealist, who sends him a circular containing the thousands of cases treated and cured, with a poetical description of the ten years hence, and perhaps a Marriage Guide, and the price required to cure such a case. He feels all the many things pictured in the book, and if the fee is within reach he is sure to send it, and only too soon finds how badly he is victimized. Not every case is troublesome enough to visit a specialist; or the young man is wise enough to first call upon the family doctor, or a friendly physician, when he is sent home with an opposite kind of discouragement; or he is treated by the latter M. D. (?), who has not booked himself on such matters, and the poor fellow is left to himself and the “_specialists_.” It is a fact, that the common practitioner is so fastidious on this subject, that he has neglected to obtain the familiarity due his own patrons; and if he attempts to treat a case, he will be as likely to fail as to do good. This lack of familiarity is the great cause of such confusion, and in the application of the term so loosely to conditions. That the subject may be better understood, I shall arrange my treatment of it, that view may be had from the several points necessary to perfect comprehension. _Causes._――The vice of masturbation is perhaps the most common cause. In youth, the sexual organs being in an undeveloped state, local weakness is very commonly produced, and that even before puberty, by the titilations taught the child by accident or by a designing nurse. The novel sensation, followed by the profuse flow of semen, commonly surprises the youth, and through curiosity and a desire to reproduce the new pleasurable sensation, he continues this very common cause, masturbation. Ignorant of the consequences that may follow, he pursues the practice with intense vigor, until the sad effects are wrought, and too late to repent, he learns the evil of his vice. Boys of the effeminate type suffer first and most from this vice, for the reason that they practice the habit more persistently than phlegmatic children and, it is a fact, that they are willing victims and their nervous system is much more susceptible to impressions. Premature development predisposes a child to manipulate the genitals, as the curiosity is excited in finding such conditions which should only accompany a more advanced age. Any handling of the genitals may indirectly give to the child the knowledge of that sexual sensation, or excite precocity of the genitals.