The necessity I found myself under of expressing this request for countenance on the part of students of Antiquity is the very thing that specially induced me to strongly recommend the First Part of my work, even on its Title-page, to their particular consideration; and it will be a source of self-congratulation if the attempts incidentally introduced to gain a better insight into the relics of Antiquity, meeting with their approval, become an inducement to the Physician in his professional studies to offer a helping hand to human weaknesses. The question at issue is nothing less than that of gaining a clear insight into the nature and origin of the operation of a Disease that destroys the very marrow of Nations. Without such insight the Physician cannot hope, whether in the particular case or speaking generally, to obtain a radical cure; and of all forms of Disease the Venereal is pre-eminently that where obscurity in the history of the malady conditions obscurity in its curative treatment. For the first time it is successfully proved with irrefragable certainty that the Ancients were infested with this _morbus mundanus_ (World-disease) just as much as the Moderns. Honourable nations are freed from the shameful reproach of fathering this Complaint; and at the same time Physicians see themselves forced to seek a reason for the untrustworthiness they recognise at the present day as belonging to the so-called “Specifics”, not in the nature of these remedies, but in the changes which the Disease has undergone under external influences. Moreover they will find that the non-mercurial treatment nowadays so highly extolled is far from being the mere creature of fashion; rather it is the direct consequence of the alteration in the common and universal _genius_ of the Complaint, which appears at this moment to be again tending to a gradual disappearance. The grounds for this assertion I have already more than once explained to my hearers in my repeated Lectures on Venereal Disease; and I propose to communicate them fully in the Second Part of my History of the Disease, framed on the same principles as the First.