The Translator of Dr. Rosenbaum’s great book, the _Geschichte der Lustseuche im Alterthume_, feels that no apology is required for presenting a Work of this calibre and importance in an English dress,—for the first time. Needless to say the Book in no way appeals,—or is meant to appeal,—to the general reading public. It is a book for Students and Specialists, as is recognized indeed by the conditions of the present publication, in a limited edition and at a high price. To Historical Students and Medical Specialists alike it is of the highest value and interest, and in many respects an indispensable addition to their Library. The object the Writer proposed to himself was a History of Venereal Disease, to trace its existence, symptoms and incidence, from the earliest notices of its occurrence recorded in Literature onwards. This ambitious programme he has only partially carried out in the present Work, which forms Part I. of the projected Treatise as a whole, and deals with the Disease under its various forms and successive manifestations throughout Antiquity. In it he devotes his efforts to proving,—and we think with conclusive success,—the existence, denied by so many, of the dread Disease in different shapes in Europe, Asia and Africa long before the Christian era, and all through the period of Classical Antiquity, scouting utterly, the popular theory of its first introduction at the end of the Fifteenth and beginning of the Sixteenth Centuries from America. With this end in view the learned and laborious Author collects an enormous _apparatus criticus_ of quotations from Greek and Latin writers, both in prose and verse, and this not merely from the better known authors of Antiquity, but equally from later and much less familiar sources. Obscure Erotic Writers, historical fragments, Christian Fathers,—all is fish that comes to his comprehensive, though not undiscriminating, net; and probably there is not to be found in the whole range of Scholarship so wide and complete a collection of historical and literary illustrations and allusions brought together with the express purpose of throwing light on one special subject of enquiry.